


After the Pillars Come Down

by Virgo827



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Clone Wars, Clone Wars Saved Exchange 2019, Gen, Hallucinations, M/M, Mission Fic, Murder Mystery, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, War, slightly dark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-03
Updated: 2019-10-03
Packaged: 2020-11-07 22:09:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 19,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20824610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Virgo827/pseuds/Virgo827
Summary: There is in war a constant feeling of being on the edge, he might have said.A desperation for solid ground. It takes you at unexpected moments, and in the precariousness, you scrabble for a handhold, a hand to hold, anything.Often, for Obi-Wan, Anakin is there.Anakin, Obi-Wan, & Ahsoka investigate the death of a Senator, and an accusation against the Jedi Order.But as the shadow of their last offensive campaign looms over them, the Jedi find it harder and harder to come to terms with what the war has made them.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Chrysaora](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chrysaora/gifts).

Her Master wouldn’t let her come with him. 

Anakin had pressed strong fingers into her shoulder when she tried to get on the back of his speeder, pushing her into the hangar bay. “No, not today, Snips. This is above your pay grade.”

She hadn’t been mad, not really. Just confused. “Master, I’m a Commander in the GAR. I had my first engagement at fourteen. What’s above my pay grade?”

“Personal favor for the Chancellor,” he said, then his face turned sour. “And I don’t like how it sounds when you put it like that.” Anakin shakes his head, star-brightened curls flapping against his cheek. Their last mission was on a desert planet. Not like Tatooine. Nothing as bad as Tatooine. Well - not the actual planet, at least. The mission hadn’t gone precisely as planned. That could be classified as bad. Ahsoka swallows, hard enough that she feels the muscles in her throat strain. She buries any further thoughts. Of the planet and its previously breathtaking capital city, tiled all blue and purple, radiant under the golden light of their star, the sun that had left the glimmering reflection in her master’s hair. 

She wondered what it would be like to have hair. Probably annoying. Anakin’s is always sticking up, and usually, when he combs his fingers through it, it’s all tangled, and they get caught and tear out big chunks, making him whine. No, Ahsoka remembers thinking. She’s glad to have montrals. Much more efficient. 

“Snips, what the kriff are you thinking about?”

“Huh?”

“You’re staring at the top of my head.” Anakin had suddenly put a hand to his scalp. “Wait - is there something there? Is there something on me?”

She giggled. “No.”

“Then stop! It’s weirding me out.”

Ahsoka forgot all about her master’s mission, which she later supposes was his precise aim. 

She hears the first rumor in the caf. There are a lot of Jedi missing. That’s not unusual. The Separatists are spreading the Order thin these last few months. Battalions come and go, deploying from Coruscant all the way to the far reaches of the Outer Rim. 

It’s the missing padawans that catch her attention. Kaycer, and Yuli. A few others she knows mostly by sight. And there are just more spaces between the others who remain. 

“Where is everyone?” she asks Aayla Secura. 

“Kaycer’s Master came and got her. I was gonna ask, but she started crying, so I figured I should back off.” The Twi’lek girl, sitting next to her own master, shrugs.

Ahsoka chews slowly on her tana root. Then springs up from the table and dashes through the hall, ignoring Quinlan Vos’ call after her, laughter in his voice. “Fire in the seat of your pants, padawan?”

She goes to Kaycer’s domicile. Knocks lightly on the frame. Barriss Offee is the one revealed when the door slides back. “Oh!” Ahsoka is suprised. Pleased, though. 

Barriss’s eyes are dark and still, like a well of deep water. Ahsoka gets a glimpse of Kaycer sitting on her bed, her face in her hands. Yuli clasps her shoulder, and frowns severely at Ahsoka in the doorway. 

“Come back later,” Barriss whispers. “It’s - not a good time.”

The Force itches under her skin. “What’s happened?”

Barriss hesitates. Then steps forward, lets the door slide shut, leaving them in the dusty silence of the cut stone hall. “Kayce got some bad news, that’s all.”

“Tell me, please.” Ahsoka lets her eyes go big and pleading. It usually works on Master Anakin. And sometimes on Obi-Wan, though he’d never admit it. 

“Do you remember Hafi Tanaar?” Barriss bites her lip, the markings on her cheeks shifting with the motion. “She was in Kaycer’s creche.”

“Yeah,” she says slowly. “Yeah, I think I do. She left, didn’t she? What - a year ago?”

Barriss nods. “Kayce took it really hard when she left.”

“Do you know why? Hafi’s Master - well, she hasn’t been back on Coruscant since,” Ahsoka says, hushed. Master Lind had never gotten along with Anakin, so she hadn’t known the soft-spoken Rodian very well, nor her padawan, but she’d heard that Hafi had been loud and brash, often obnoxious. Always smiling, though, when Ahsoka saw her. She’d always tasted a faint tang of disapproval radiating from any other Master in Hafi’s presence. A taste that had grown rather familiar, given her own Master, and the way he seemed hellbent on driving Windu into an early retirement or an apoplectic fit. Or both.

“It was an honorable decision,” her friend replies, with some bite. “She disagreed with the direction of the Order. With - with the Council turning into the Republic’s war dogs.”

Ahsoka blinks at her. Barriss goes back to biting her lip. Unease gnaws at her gut, as she realizes that Barriss often looks like that, lately. As if she’s containing words unsaid, imprisoning unspoken thoughts behind her teeth. 

“I don’t understand,” Ahsoka says. “What does this have to do with Kaycer? Does she still talk to Hafi? Is her Master worried she’ll convince her to leave too?”

The notion goes off in her mind like a depth charge, sending a tremor through foundations she assumed were solid. _ Can Jedi just leave the Order? Just, walk away, and abandon the people that they’ve known all their life? _

“Kaycer’s Master doesn’t have to worry about Hafi’s influence anymore,” Barriss mutters. “She’s on the run.”

“What?” Ahsoka gasps. 

“Yuli’s creche-mate heard it from his Master, who liases with the Senate Guard. They say she killed a junior senator and fled the scene.”

Her mind expands in leaps and bounds. “That’s where he went.”

Barriss looks at her sharply, but she shakes her head. The door hisses open, and Kayce is there, purple shadows under her pale eyes. Her black hair is uncombed, tangled, like she’s fisted her hands in it. “It’s not true,” she rasps. “Hafi couldn’t have. She wouldn’t do that. She didn’t want to be a Jedi anymore, but it doesn’t mean she’s a killer.”

“Why do they think she did it? What’s the evidence against her?” Ahsoka asks. 

“They found her lightsaber at the scene,” Kayce mutters. 

Ahsoka stares. “She still had it? I thought it was confiscated when she left the Order.”

No one responds. After her shock settles a little, Ahsoka understands. If she - stars forbid - if she left the Order, she’d hate to leave behind her lightsaber. Her blades feel more like muscle and bone than steel and plastic, when they’re in her grip. And she’s positive Anakin would let her keep them. He’d lie to the Council if he had to. 

Yuli hovers behind Kaycer. “And because of the antiwar stuff,” she says, but cuts off at Kayce’s glare. 

“Look - if you know anything, you should tell me.” Ahsoka squares her shoulders, draws herself up like she does when she’s addressing the clones. Barriss is often deployed with Master Unduli, so she seems to recognize the stance, and lifts her chin. The other two padawans shrink back. 

Kayce and Yuli’s Masters are both healers, and they don’t see much action off Coruscant. They’re not Commanders. Ahsoka feels the divide between them deeply in that moment, a crevasse. 

“My Master has gone to investigate,” she says. Ahsoka is almost positive. No wonder he didn’t want her to come with him. A traitorous padawan, fleeing from the law? Or ex-padawan. It’s delicate. “Anything you tell me that can help, I can tell him.”

“They’re having a _ General _investigate?” Barriss shoots her a look filled to the brim with skepticism. “Shouldn’t he be planning the next offensive? That’s what Master Luminara is doing.”

“The Chancellor asked him. A favor.”

“The Supreme Chancellor of the Republic?” Yuli gasps. “Knows about Hafi? And - asked your master a _ favor _?”

“He’s a General,” Barriss reiterates. The answer to Yuli’s question, and still a restatement of her own. Ahsoka ignores it, because she doesn’t actually know why Anakin is investigating. 

“Will he listen to you?” Yuli asks, tugging at her soft, floating antennae. Her blue skin is a shade paler than normal, washed out in the white light spilling from the open door of Kaycer’s fresher. “My master says Skywalker’s ears are stuffed full of bantha - um,” she stammers. “That he’s not, well, a good listener.”

“He listens when it’s important,” Ahsoka snipes, pointed. She is tired of having to defend him. Everyone in the Temple has got _ opinions, _and it’s so very frustrating. Maybe if they could see the way he can cut through a drone unit in four efficient maneuvers. Maybe if they could feel the way his whole Force presence brightens, like the sun coming over the glass spires of Coruscant, when he smiles. 

Yuli, stung at the implication, opens her mouth to snap back, but Barriss raises her hands. She’s the oldest of them, and they all subside. Even Ahsoka. 

Kaycer breaks the silence. “My Master told me to stop talking to her, okay? He didn’t know she was back on Coruscant. Didn’t know we were still in contact,” she says, subdued. 

“Did you tell him now?”

“No.” The near-human girl hunches her shoulders up, defensive. “She was talking to some antiwar group. They were planning a bunch of demonstrations and stuff. It wasn’t anything big, just to support the peace initiative that Senator Mothma is planning to bring before the Planetary Defense Committee.”

Kaycer had been leaning against the sandstone wall, spine curved inward, but now she stands straight, feet planted. “All I know is that something changed. The last time I talked to Hafi, she said she was going to back out. I swear. Tell Knight Skywalker that. You have to tell him.”

“What changed?” Ahsoka prods. 

“I don’t know. The guy she’d always talked about, the group’s leader - I think his name is Nan Kavala. He was really mad about the GAR offensive on Cabaron.”

The name settles like a chill, as if someone opened a docking gate and let in a breeze from the void of space. Even though there is no such thing. Ahsoka’s always imagined it, when they’re on a starcruiser in a desolate sect of the Outer Rim. The kind of place where all you can see is darkness. When the hum of the engine sounds like a heartbeat through the ship’s hull. 

She swallows. Barriss nudges her side. Ahsoka ignores that too, with a touch of guilt this time. She can’t talk about Cabaron, not right now. It hasn’t been long enough since their troop transports lifted from the skin of that desert planet. Leaving behind smoke and rubble, a grit in her teeth she can feel when she clenches her jaw. 

“They wanted justice, didn’t they?” Barriss says, when Ahsoka doesn’t respond. “They wanted someone to be held accountable.” She cuts a glance at Kaycer, sounding curious. “Do you know what they were planning?”

“Hafi wouldn’t tell me. She said she was going offworld. Somewhere that needed her. Help man a medical station, maybe.” Kaycer stares at Ahsoka, her eyes glittering hard and pale. “Why would she say that, if she was going to do this?” 

“I don’t know. But I’ll find out.” She leaves the other padawans behind, and makes it to the junction where the hall to the doms splits before she realizes she doesn’t know where Anakin went. One cavernous hall leads to the hangar bay, the other to the caf, and another to the main entrance hall. 

Ahsoka comms him, but he doesn’t pick up. She hesitates for a second, and then comms Master Kenobi. 

“Padawan?” His voice is warm, reassuring. 

“Do you know where Anakin went? There was a mission, I know, but he wouldn’t let me come.”

“I am certain he had good reason.”

“You know what it was about,” she accuses. 

His sigh filters over the open line. “I am a Council Member, Ahsoka. Of course I know.”

“Right. No, I - of course. It’s just… I think I have information that could be mission relevant, Master.”

There is a pause, then, “Meet me at the fountain.”

The Room of a Thousand Fountains is to the right. She follows the winding thread of the passage until she comes out underneath the wavering green glow that pours in from distant filtered skylights. Silver water arcs and jumps around her. The scent of fertile earth fills her nose. Master Obi-Wan is perched on a bronze edge of the largest fountain. 

“It’s Hafi Tanaar, isn’t it?” 

He blinks. “What do you know of Hafi Tanaar?”

“Kaycer Yagobar is her friend. They said she’s accused of killing a junior senator.” 

Obi-Wan hushes her, pulls her to the side of the room, under the shade of a giant fern. “This is need to know, Ahsoka.”

“Kayce says she got a comm from Hafi yesterday,” Ahsoka says quietly. “That Hafi was planning on shipping offworld, going to work on a medical station. She said it doesn’t make sense that she’d attack a senator. And I think she’s right.”

“She didn’t tell anyone this?” Ahsoka shakes her head. He thinks for a moment, his Force presence curling and flickering along with the color of his changeable eyes. Now blue, then grey, and then a flicker of green like the leaves that frame his head in a verdant crown. 

“Anakin is at the Senate Dome,” he reveals. “I am heading there now.” Obi-Wan turns a stern gaze on her. “You may come - _ if,” _he stresses, once she leaps forward, ready to dash to her dom and grab a cloak, “If I can count on your discretion. No talking to Kaycer Yagobar about this case unless you clear it with me or Anakin first. And no gossiping about this with other padawans. This is an extremely serious charge. And against a former Jedi…” He presses his lips together, forming a white line. “The galactic press would have a field day with this. There are already questions about the Order’s position with the GAR.”

Ahsoka feels the expectation settle like a weight on her shoulders. She nods, serious. “I won’t let you down.”

“Then follow me.”


	2. Chapter 2

Anakin steps back from the closet, one hand over his mouth. “Things just got a lot more complicated,” he murmurs to Rex. 

They’d been about to run some flight exercises with the clone pilots when Anakin got the call from Chancellor Palpatine. Rex had tagged along, and now he’s glad that his commander came with him. He didn’t want to show this to the Guard, not yet. 

The Senate Guards have their own investigative force. And they were first on the scene. Which might be important. It could have given them time to hide the - the thing in the closet, before anyone else responded. The details of what happened aren’t clear, but he’s always lead with suspicion rather than trust. 

The Senate Guard hadn’t been happy to allow Jedi on their crime scene, not when one of their own charges had been killed. But the body of Senator Yacen Eliarr has lightsaber marks scattered across the torso. Along the limbs. Clear cause of death. And that only made the Blues jumpier, shooting him furtive glances, muttering under their breath. 

Eliarr was laid out behind his desk when Anakin and Rex arrived at the scene. There had been a struggle, that was obvious. A smashed lamp, the detritus of papers. His hand-embroidered midnight blue robe was torn. The lightsaber had lain on Eliarr’s chest, as if the murderer had discarded it just as he was taking his last breaths. But why flee without your primary weapon? A Jedi doesn’t leave behind their saber unless they’re forced to. 

Anakin shuts the closet and presses his back to the door. He’d gotten his answer to that question. His gaze wanders to the crowded hall outside this storage area as he considers how to approach this new development. 

The office - the crime scene - is on one of the lower levels of the Senate Dome. It’s a warren down here, where they shove everyone who isn’t high profile enough to rate an upper floor, or whose planet doesn’t have a legacy office, one that is theirs by long tradition. There’s little organization. And he’s already heard some administrative staff bickering over who gets Senator Eliarr’s space once they close the scene. 

As the junior senator for the Mid Rim planet of Haruun Kal, Eliarr hadn’t rated terribly high - but his was one of the offices nearest the center of the labyrinth, very close to the turbolifts. Basically the center of the dome itself. The Audience Chamber has to be directly above, ten floors up, Anakin thinks. Palpatine’s office would have to be at the highest point above that.

“There’s a lot of people down here,” he murmurs. “Lot of witnesses. Sloppy.”

“What is it, General?” Rex seems to pick up on his circumspect tone, and leans against the wall next to him, as if they were just shooting the breeze. 

“I found Padawan Tanaar,” he whispers. 

Rex starts to jerk his head toward the closet, then suppresses the motion. “In there?”

“Yep. Dead.”

“Well, blast me into space. Complicated is right.”

“There’s something more going on here.” Ani shakes his head. “Who killed her? Not self-defense. It wasn’t the Senator.”

“Maybe she got injured in the struggle, then crawled in there to hide while the Guard came. Underestimated her wound?”

He swallows around a lump. “Nope. It’s - a slash to the throat. A blade. Long, serrated.”

Someone is gonna have to tell Master Lind, and it sure as shit isn’t gonna be him. Obi-Wan, hopefully. He’s good at that kind of thing. Being all calm and stoic, carved from granite. Not letting his own emotions bleed out from behind his Force shields, infecting everyone else in the room, causing mass hysteria. It had only happened the once, on that scale, but it was enough to turn a few more of Obi-Wan’s russet hairs to grey. 

It’s better if Anakin just stays away. Because when he thinks of the girl’s body, curled in on itself in the dark closet, dried blood in a waterfall down her white tunic, all he can see is Ahsoka’s face superimposed on hers. 

If that had been - Anakin doesn’t know what he’d have done. Probably blasted off the top of the Senate Dome, sent shards of glass and concrete spraying down over the city-planet in a hellishly sharp rain. Collateral damage. He’s got a knack for that, unfortunately. Cabaron was only the latest in a line of disasters for the Order’s reputation. 

And now this. He sucks his lower lip into his mouth. Obi-Wan hates when he does that. Says it makes him look like a child, that it gives too much of his thoughts away. He should be a blank slate, especially in front of civilians. But his Master’s not here, so what does it matter - 

“Anakin,” comes that voice, with the hidden warning. 

He jumps out of his skin. “Son of a dirty _ Hutt, _where did you come from!”

Obi-Wan folds his arms across his chest. “You know very well I am no kin to Jabba. Thank the Force,” he mutters. Anakin grins. Then he sees the poky blue and white head of his padawan, peering from behind his master sheepishly. 

Anakin shoves Rex against the closet door. The clone grunts at him in affront. “Why did you bring her here?” he demands. 

Ahsoka’s face falls. Obi-Wan frowns. “She has information about the padawan Hafi Tanaar’s motive. Or rather, her lack of motive. That could inform her movements, if she’s set on fleeing offplanet.”

He runs a hand through his hair. “Not - not that I’m not glad to see you, Snips, really. It’s just - ” Anakin meets his old master’s gaze and lets him follow it to the closet that Rex is guarding with his body. “We don’t really need to track Tanaar’s movements anymore.”

Despite everything that happened after Cabaron, Obi-Wan seems to understand immediately. Anakin had been worried. It was the silence, on the transport back to Republic space, that unnerved him. The grim lines on Obi-Wan’s face as he stood over the remains of Ul-Saan’s pillars. The yawning distance between their minds, which widened so far in the aftermath that he could barely pinpoint his master’s presence onboard the star destroyer, let alone know his feelings. 

“Ah,” Obi-Wan says. He spins and grabs Ahsoka’s shoulders. “Why don’t you go and take a look around the crime scene,” he tells her. “We’ll be over in a few minutes to get your impressions.”

She glances between them. “Uh. Okay.”

Rex hurries forward. “I’ll show you.”

Anakin covers the door while he ushers Ahsoka back into the hall and to the senator’s office. Obi-Wan gestures. “In there?” He nods, wordless, and lets his Master look. Watches how his whole posture deflates. “Child,” Obi-Wan murmurs. “May the Force be with you.”

His earlier flash of irritation vanishes. Anakin’s glad Obi-Wan is there too, like he was with Rex, but this is better, a greater relief. “Is Master Lind on Coruscant?” Anakin asks. 

“No. She’ll have to be recalled. Stars, I cannot imagine how this news will go down. First her padawan leaves the Order, and now this. No Master should have to live through such a tragedy.”

“I know. I keep - I keep thinking about Ahsoka,” he admits hoarsely. 

Obi-Wan looks at him. An array of feelings flicker over his pale face, lightning-quick. Too fast for Anakin to sense. There is a shadow to his presence in the Force, a grey underbelly, like a stormfront moving in. He grips Anakin’s shoulder, almost too tightly. “It is not a thought to be entertained,” he says. 

“She’s a fighter,” Anakin says, mostly to reassure himself. 

“As are you,” Obi-Wan murmurs. He bends down over the padawan’s body and rifles through her robes. No saber, obviously. Her killer left that on the body of Senator Eliarr. 

His master sits back on his heels. In the palm of his hand is a half-cracked data chip, a credit stick, and a Planet Resident pass for the airtrain. Anakin picks out the chip. 

“Nothing fancy,” he says. “Cheap, could buy it at any shop. Don’t know if we can get the data off, not with it damaged like this.”

Obi-Wan is content to let him examine it. He maintains it’s a Force skill, Anakin’s success with mechanics. Anakin maintains that it is more related to his own brilliance than anything to do with the Force. 

“What brought you to this closet?” Obi-Wan asks, brushing his reddish hair away from his forehead. It had gotten long, on their last mission. No time to care about personal grooming. Anakin likes that it renders him slightly less than the perfect Jedi image. More Obi, and less Master Kenobi. 

He shrugs. “Dunno. Instinct.”

His old master nods. “The Force. That explains why the Blues didn’t find it. And that tells me whoever committed this crime is not terribly familiar with Jedi. Perhaps in a working capacity, but nothing with any real intimacy.”

Anakin resists the urge to chew on his lip again. “Not a Dark acolyte, then. Probably not a clone. They’ve seen us do plenty of crazy stuff. They’d be hyper cautious, and they’d know we’d get called in, for something like this. And why would they want Jedi called in?”

“Right now, I’m wondering if the killer works in the Senate Dome itself.” Obi-Wan is pointing to the card access slot, to the right of the closet door. 

“Yeah.” Anakin had used the Force to pop the lock. Anyone else would need a basic access pass. Which left about a couple thousand suspects. Still, it’s part of the reason why Anakin didn’t want to involve the Senate Guard just yet.

He fiddles with the data chip again. It’s a reader chip - plug it into any terminal, and it lets the user access files that have been sent over the connection. And that connection is still active, he can sense the slight tremor, emitting a faint signal. The terminal must be within range. 

“I think I can find where the data on this chip was sent from,” he tells Obi-Wan. 

His master stands and shuts the closet. “I’ll get Rex back in here to guard the room. It’ll tip them off that we’ve found her, if the killer remained in the building, but there’s not much we can do about that. I need to speak to Mace and the other Council members that are on-planet. Kit, I think. Plo Koon.”

“This is a setup, isn’t it. They’re trying to make the Order look bad.”

“I’m afraid you’re right. I feel that there is more, though. This is too hasty. Too sloppy to be just a frame job for the Jedi. I think they took advantage of a situation that got out of control.”

“So there’s more to come.” Anakin rubs the back of his neck. He summons the will to speak. “I know - I know after our last mission, the press is gonna come down hard on the Order.”

The words are tentative. They still haven’t broken the silence about what happened at Ul-saan. Anakin made a call. Obi-Wan hadn’t liked it. The screaming match they’d gotten into had been proof of that. They’d nearly come to blows over the bodies of three Jedi and twenty clones. The line of civilians, covered in white sheets.

It didn’t usually happen like that. Their disagreements. But exhaustion had clouded both their minds, Anakin was sure. Exhaustion and grief and horror. It wasn’t fitting, Anakin knows that. 

But he won’t admit he was wrong. Just like Obi-Wan won’t admit that he would’ve made the same decision, only taken longer to come around to the inevitable. 

So they’ve been pretending it never happened. Which is great and fine, Anakin’s got no problem with that. He doesn’t like to think about things that bother him. He would rather press it down deeply, bury it somewhere in the cavity of his chest, than deal with it out in the open. Too much risk for a mess, a blowout. For one of them to say something they will regret. 

Obi-Wan licks his lips. “Ah - yes. I imagine they will.”

“Right.” He curls his palm around the data chip. “I’ll just work on tracking down the terminal point that sent the data on here.”

His master doesn’t say anything. For a second, Anakin is seized with a wild desire to go to him, fall to his knees, apologize. To make him look at Anakin. He wants Obi-Wan to lay a hand on his brow, his cheek, to meet his gaze and say in his soft voice, _ It’s alright, my padawan. It’s alright, Anakin. _

Obi-Wan goes into the hall and flags down Rex. Anakin lets the impulse shiver and fade, then follows him. Ahsoka is talking to a tall Nautolan Senate Guard, pointing at the junior senator’s desk. He can still see the man’s feet sticking out from behind the leather chair. 

Anakin turns to leave. Obi-Wan will get her back to the Temple. Once she’s in her domicile, in a familiar, secure area, then he’ll tell her about Hafi Tanaar. 

Closing his eyes, he prods at the chip. It’s a short-range signal. Which is weird, actually. A cheap, disposable chip. Easily hidden, easily lost, and so perfect for certain activities. For setting up meeting places and dead drops. More common for pirates and petty criminals. This doesn’t seem like the kind of place for it. He would’ve expected something more advanced, if whoever killed Hafi Tanaar left it on her body. They were sophisticated enough that they managed to kill a Senator and a former Jedi. Not petty at all. Unless they’d gotten a recent upgrade. A boost of money and supplies, to prepare for something big. 

Three steps down the corridor, and he can see a swarm of holoreporters waiting in the distance. Ugh. Better to let Obi-Wan deal with that. Anakin thinks of an excuse to be anywhere else while the Guard and his master finish processing the scene. 

He spins round before the reporters catch sight of him. He passes by Obi-Wan again, heading for the stairs on the opposite end. “After I track the data chip signal, I've gotta run back to the Temple! I promised Aayla I'd help her run the initiates through those saber forms.” Anakin calls over his shoulder. Perfect. He should be able to sneak out another entrance, and now Obi-Wan won’t be waiting up for him. 

Obi-Wan raises a brow. He's too far away to make a dry comment under his breath. 

Anakin slips his mind within the circuitry of the chip, lets the Force guide his footsteps. He descends into the bowels of the Senate Dome, deeper even than the warren of offices where Senator Eliarr and Padawan Tanaar were murdered. 

There are mostly mechanicals, down here. The slow drip of some plumbing. Air ducts, heating pipes, water pipes. The rayshield generator must be down here somewhere. The Dome has precautions against an active attack, and the crystal-generated shield is one of them. It can be operated by the Supreme Chancellor from his office, and expand to cover the entire building. 

The only thing Anakin sees are storage closets and what looks like row after row of locked databanks. Ahead, there’s a riveted metal door with a sign in Basic and a few common Core languages announcing a maintenance office. Can’t hurt to peek in and ask if there are any nearby terminals, he decides. A camera blinks a red light in the corner. He waves. “Someone in there?”

No response. He whistles a greeting, in binary. Maybe it’s a droid depot. There’s gotta be a droid connected to the mainframe down here, one that he can give his Temple code and Jedi ID. “This is Knight Skywalker.” Anakin pushes back his cloak to show the hilt of his saber. 

A scuff sounds off the wet stone. But - from the wrong side. Not in the maintenance office. Behind. 

The Force trills a warning. Too late, because he feels the slide of a needle into his neck. “Sithspit,” he hisses, snatching at the dart. Pulls it from the skin and crushes it under his boot. It’ll take more than a sedative to knock down a Jedi. Anakin turns and ignites his blade in one motion, striking out and to the side. 

A choked grunt. In the dim, he can see a person, masked and cloaked, crumple to the ground. He manages a laugh, before the second dart hits. Lunging, he lashes out wide. There are more cries of pain, as there are more darts, a piercing rain falling on him, like the one he'd imagined earlier, sharp and full of edges. Anakin wobbles on his feet, as his vision turns on an invisible axis. 

Pushing out hard with the Force, he repels his attackers, then stumbles to find the wall. Runs his hands across it. Follows the metal of the sub-basement, feeling the rust flake off onto his fingers. 

The wall becomes the floor. The ceiling swims over him. He barely registers the fall, cold on his knees through the thin cotton of his leggings. “Wassinthat?” Anakin slurs. _ Not a sedative, not just a sedative. Gotta comm Obi-Wan. _

As he grabs for his belt, someone gets there first, takes his comm in hand. A voice, scratchy and deep, sounding feminine, murmurs in his ear. “You took a wrong turn, Jedi.”

_ I’m the best pilot in the galaxy, _he thinks, as a sort of scummy sleep grows and spreads over the tendrils of his mind. “Don’t take wrong turns.”

The last he hears is a laugh.


	3. Chapter 3

He needs to tell Ahsoka about Padawan Tanaar. Anakin should be doing this, but he’d taken one look at the hovering reporters, and disappeared to investigate that chip. Obi-Wan could have insisted. However - there is something fragile between them at the moment. It would have been like pressing on a bruise. 

His grandpadawan is frowning around Senator Eliarr’s office. “Did Hafi know him?” she asks. 

“The senator represented the planet of Haruun Kal.” Obi-Wan searches his memory. “I believe Master Lind completed a diplomatic mission on the surface once. A dispute between neighboring clans over resources. Something to that effect. Padawan Tanaar was likely with her.”

“Oh. Where’s Master Anakin?”

“He went to investigate that data chip.” And not just that. Thirty minutes after he left, he commed Obi-Wan. 

_ Dead end. I’m headed to the Temple. Don't wait up._

Obi-Wan hadn’t responded. He highly doubts Anakin rushed off to help Aayla Secura with a class of initiates, of all things. Probably skived off to race through the underlevels on his speeder. A dereliction of duty, really. But Anakin has been wound so tightly. Won’t talk about Cabaron, what happened at Ul-Saan. If he can blow off some steam, it might be for the best.

“Oh.” Her eyes keep flitting back to Senator Eliarr’s body.

“What else did Kaycer Yagobar tell you about Hafi?” he says quickly. 

Ahsoka turns around fully to face him. “She mentioned a name. Nan Kavala. Said he was part of an antiwar group.”

“Kavala… it rings a bell.” Obi-Wan tugs on his beard. 

“Do you think she was right, in leaving the Order?” Ahsoka blurts out. Her cheeks are tinged a deeper orange than normal. 

“I didn’t know Padawan Tanaar,” he begins gently. “I do not know her mind. I imagine she acted as she felt was best. And since she hadn’t yet taken her Trials, she was less… bound than she might have been.”

“But you wouldn’t ever leave the Order?”

“The Order is all I have ever known.” Obi-Wan points out.

“Do you agree with the war?” she presses. 

“Padawan,” he says with a sigh. Ahsoka chews on her lower lip. That blasted habit she inherited from Anakin. “Whether or not I agree with the war, it is my duty to serve. I am a General of the Grand Army of the Republic. The Jedi have been entrusted with command.”

The days of his own padawanhood, the days when he might have asked such a question too, are long over. 

The Order is the War, and the War is now the Order. 

It is not to say he has never wondered. How things would be if there were no next battle, shadowing the horizon. Obi-Wan has grown so used to the rhythm of combat. He often imagines what Master Qui Gon would say, could he see his padawan now. 

He feels a century older than his old master. Obi-Wan could provide Qui Gon with hard-earned wisdom. The kind Qui Gon was used to doling out. He could have told him how the Force slightly thickens, grows tangible, in the heartbeats before a hail of blasterfire. The way you can tell the velocity, the direction of the bolts, as they meet that resistance. How a Jedi learns these quirks quickly - or doesn’t. Obi-Wan could describe that gossamer, spiderweb of an instant just after a fatal wound, just before the Living Force leaves a body, when the eyes are going dull, but the limbs still jerk. 

There is in war a constant feeling of being on the edge, he might have said. 

A desperation for solid ground. It takes you at unexpected moments, and in the precariousness, you scrabble for a handhold, a hand to hold, anything. 

Often, for Obi-Wan, Anakin is there. 

Obi-Wan drinks him in like the sun. He is warm. In the Force, the sense of him is almost hot, a taste of magma, a swallowed flame. Burning and burning, the heart of a star, the breath of a krayt dragon. Sometimes, it singes him. Anakin’s Force presence. And Anakin too. He is not easy to hold onto. 

A different sort of Jedi, his padawan. It worries him, until it does not. Anakin seems made for this war. A sort of shame creeps in with those thoughts. As if he is doing the young man a disservice, but Obi-Wan can see the way he stands taller, when he thinks he has a purpose. A rootless, wandering Anakin is a danger to himself and others. 

He is always looking for someone to tell him what to do. Obi-Wan imagines how he would bristle, if he ever told Anakin that observation. 

For all Obi-Wan has been heralded as a commander, a negotiator, a general, this war sits uneasy on his shoulders. He finds it hard to commit fully. Oh, he knows his duty. Knows it like a chain of iron around his wrists. He would not betray it, unless - unless…

It is always the _ unless _that haunts him. Nuance is second nature to him, a flow and ebb of information, understanding, another perspective. He knows his duty and would not dream of betraying it. Then the voice in his mind starts constructing tests for him, for his endurance, for his commitment. It starts wondering just when something might outweigh duty. It starts to dream. Coming up with reasons, justifications. 

There are so many pathways. So much that remains unknown. A forest lives in his head, murky and dim beneath the boughs.

Obi-Wan is not decisive by nature, though experience has made him so. When he is unwary, his fundamental self returns with a vengeance, ever questioning, at the worst moments. 

Anakin had made that fateful decision, on their last offensive, on Cabaron. Obi-Wan was torn between considerations, between vows. To the Jedi, to the Republic, to the governor of the planet. To the mother of the dead child, the one he’d tried to save in the street under the crumbling ash of their home, bombed by rebels supporting the Separatists. _ Stop, _ she’d said. _ Please go, leave us be! Leave this planet! _

Ahsoka interrupts his silent remembrance, and he closes his eyes, thanks her for it. For her young, quicksilver mind, outstripping his own old and weary bones. 

“There’s a datapad over here,” Ahsoka points out. 

He clears his throat. “That’s odd. We already found Eliarr’s datapad.” Obi-Wan goes to examine it. There’s a serial number on the side, ending with a Senatorial designation. He glances around, and finding the Inspector in Charge of the scene, waves her over. 

Inspector Chun is an older, stern Tholothian. She steps over to Obi-Wan. He senses a faint dissatisfaction. Likely at being summoned in her own crime scene by a Jedi. “Yes?”

“Do you know this designation?”

Chun pulls out her wrist scanner and types in the code. “It belongs to - huh.”

“Who?” Ahsoka prods. 

“It’s assigned to the Pantoran delegation. Senator Riyo Chuchi. How did it get here?” Chun wonders aloud.

“Do we know where Senator Chuchi is now? If she was in this office and left her datapad, it might make her the last to see Eliarr alive.” 

“If it wasn’t stolen,” Ahsoka adds. 

“Right. We need to contact her.”

Chun is already speaking into her comm. 

Obi-Wan turns to Ahsoka. “Nan Kavala. I remember where I’ve heard that name before. He and his sister Syl Kavala lead a militant antiwar group that began harassing the Mid Rim some years ago, before moving into the Core.”

“Militant antiwar group? Isn’t that a contradiction?”

“There are few true distinctions in times such as these,” he muses. 

Chun shoves between them. “Senator Chuchi’s staff has been looking for her. No one’s seen her for two hours.”

“Then this is not a coincidence.” He eyes the datapad. “She was here, when Senator Eliarr was murdered.”

“Or she murdered him,” Chun points out. 

“Then why leave evidence behind?” Ahsoka says. 

“Do you think she’s dead too?” Chun directs her question to Obi-Wan. 

Before he can answer, a tremor runs through the marble underneath Obi-Wan’s feet. He doesn’t stumble. Inspector Chun catches herself on the edge of Eliarr’s desk. Ahsoka looks up sharply. “What was that?”

As she speaks, the lights flicker. An automated voice comes over the Dome’s internal system, echoing. _ “Emergency shields activated. All Senate Guards report to command stations. Please remain calm.” _


	4. Chapter 4

“The Dome’s shields have come up.” Obi-Wan is looking through the tall, arched window. They’ve gone to the upper floors, to the Guard’s main command station. Ahsoka comes up next to him, and can see the shimmering crimson of the energy field, curving around the outside of the building. “Who ordered the activation?” her grandmaster demands. 

Chun turns, lines of stress on her brow. “I don’t know. It was an override code.”

“What does that mean?” Ahsoka didn’t even know the Senate Dome had a crystal-generated shield big enough to encompass the whole place. Let alone two.

“There’s an external shield to cover the building. And then an internal shield, one that comes down to protect the heart of the dome. The Chancellor’s office. The Audience Chamber,” Chun tells them. “Normally, the Supreme Chancellor or the Head of the Senate Guard are the only ones who have the authority to activate the emergency protocol. And to have both of them activate at once - it doesn’t make sense. It’s a staggered system.” Chun lets out a huff of air. “The Chancellor’s staff is saying he didn’t do it, and Chief Hamandi didn’t either.”

The Head of the Guard is on the other side of the room, barking orders, purple-faced with fury. “Get those damned vipers out of here!” he shouts, pointing at the buzzing, floating flock of holocameras. 

The holonews journalists are hovering below the their cams, barely held at bay by the temporary metal barricade someone had thrown haphazardly across the doorway. They’d swarmed Master Obi-Wan and Ahsoka as they came upstairs, after they were recognized as Jedi. Hollering questions into their faces. Ahsoka hadn’t flinched, but it was a near thing, given the content. 

_ Why have the shields gone up? _

_ Has another body been found? _

_ Have the Jedi murdered another Senator? _

_ Is the Order at war with the Senate? _

“Madness,” Obi-Wan murmurs, gaze drawn in that direction. “We need to get this sorted, sooner rather than later." He goes to Inspector Chun and says something that is too low to hear. She turns and goggles at him. 

“The closet?” she says. “What? On the same floor? But - I had my Guard search the whole area. That’s impossible.” 

Master Obi-Wan continues speaking. It looks urgent. Ahsoka wants to sidle over, but Rex has come upstairs, and is asking for an update. She tries to half-listen. All she hears is Inspector Chun’s last sentence before she heads to the stairs almost at a sprint. “I’ll process the scene myself.”

Ahsoka opens her mouth to ask. A Senate Guard rushes up, and she bites her tongue, ungracefully. “Master Jedi, you need to see this.”

Obi-Wan goes, and Ahsoka follows. They are drawn into the tight knot of commanders, Chief Hamandi among them, quiet, for once. But the veins on his neck are still standing out, thick worms along the tendons. 

“What is it?” Master Obi-Wan says curtly. He has drawn himself up, in full command, the Force pulled around him like a mantle of armor. 

“A ransom demand.”

Ahsoka blinks. _ Senator Chuchi’s staff has been looking for her for two hours. _

“Video?” Obi-Wan says. 

“No. Just a few lines of Basic.”

“What does it say?” Ahsoka asks. 

Obi-Wan reads from the pad in the Guard’s hand. “You are invited to attend the trial of those responsible for the unlawful invasion of ten hundred systems in the name of a false war. The accusations will be televised over the Holonet to allow the entire galaxy to participate in the judgment. The Senators and the Jedi will admit their guilt or the entire Senate will pay for their perjury.”

There is a deafening silence. “The Jedi?” Ahsoka’s fingers tremble. “Does that mean - they have Hafi?”

Obi-Wan’s face creases but he doesn’t respond. “I need to speak to the Council. Someone get me a commlink. Now.”

“I’m going to contact Anakin.” Ahsoka pulls out her comm. He doesn’t answer this time either. She messages him. _ Where are you? Emergency in Senate Dome. _

All the members of the Council that are on Coruscant have arrayed themselves around the holocomm. Their outlines shimmer, like the energy of the red rayshield, outside the window. Mace Windu, Kit Fisto. Master Yoda. Master Plo.

Obi-Wan barely pauses before he launches into a brief rundown of their investigation into Senator Eliarr’s death. Ahsoka tries not to squirm as he details the information she got from Kaycer. It couldn’t be helped. She probably won’t get into too much trouble.

After he’s finished, the Council members start asking questions. “The Senate Dome is in full lockdown.” Windu’s arms are locked behind his back. “What’s going on?”

“This is not a sanctioned lockdown.” Obi-Wan mirrors Windu’s posture. “Someone has programmed the rayshield generator with an override code. Neither the Supreme Chancellor nor Chief Hamandi have given the command.”

“And? Something else, there is?” Yoda presses, seeming to read Obi-Wan’s mind. 

“A hostage situation.” That news passes through the holograms like an invisible wind; they shift, bend, and flicker. 

“Who?” Kit Fisto asks. 

“Senator Riyo Chuchi, we believe. Several other members of her administrative staff are missing. They are likely hostages as well.”

“And Hafi Tanaar.” She hadn’t meant to say that. The whole Council turns to her, as does Master Obi-Wan. He is not smiling or bemused at the interruption. Ahsoka swallows. 

“We don’t know precisely,” he says. “The message implied that they had a Jedi, but they could have been referring to the Order as a whole.”

“Do you believe it is Padawan Tanaar, like Tano here?” Mace Windu is a direct sort. 

Obi-Wan pauses, then rests one hand on her shoulder. His eyes are a steel grey when he looks at her, solemn. Her heart begins pounding in her chest. 

“No,” he says. “I’m afraid not.” Obi-Wan meets Yoda’s gaze. “We found the body of Padawan Tanaar a few hours ago.”

Ahsoka wants to cry out, but has no breath in her chest. There are data points in her mind, laid out like a star map, and they begin to connect, one by one, fast as a hyperlane. 

_ If it’s not Hafi, then… _“They have a Jedi in custody,” she says, her voice coming out distorted, strangled. “They said as much.”

“Where is Skywalker?” Master Windu speaks her terrible thought aloud, his brows pulling down. 

“Not in the Dome,” her grandmaster replies. Ahsoka’s eyes dart to him. How does he know that?

“He’s not responding to my comms,” she argues. “What if - what if - ”

“I am not concerned about Anakin.” Obi-Wan dismisses her fear with a slight shake of the head, then stands there, not a tremor to be seen. Ahsoka feels like she’s just been bowled over by a droideka. 

“But we do not have confirmation of his location,” Windu notes. “So there is a possibility he is the Jedi in the custody of these terrorists.”

“It is a possibility,” Obi-Wan agrees lightly.

Yoda speaks. “If true, that is, hold him for long, they shall not.”

“He does have a reputation for getting out of tight spots,” Master Fisto adds. 

Her feet curl up in her shoes. She needs to run. She needs to get out of here, and start searching the entire Dome, every crevice. She needs to find her Master. 

“We should be focusing on the terrorists themselves, not Anakin,” Master Obi-Wan says. Ahsoka clenches her fists. “The Kavala siblings. What do we know? Are they capable of delivering on their threat?”

“We don’t even know what the threat is.” 

They debate, and Ahsoka stands there, numb to her core. Hafi Tanaar is dead. Obi-Wan knew. Her master must have known. And now he’s missing, and Obi-Wan doesn’t appear to care. 

The other Council members shimmer out of view. Mace Windu remains, staring. He apparently shares Ahsoka’s disbelief.

“Pardon this observation, Obi-Wan. You seem remarkably calm and collected about your former padawan’s unknown whereabouts.” A muscle in Mace Windu’s jaw ticks. “I’m relieved, of course,” he says, and to Ahsoka, it sounds like he means _ suspicious. _

Her grandmaster tucks his hands into his sleeves. Not perturbed in the slightest. It makes something in Ahsoka’s gut churn, a nasty cauldron of anger and resentment and a solid, impenetrable stone of confusion. 

“I trust that the Force will reveal all in time,” he says, placid.

_ Is this what acceptance looks like? Is this the Code, the true path of the Force? _Maybe Ahsoka's the one who has this all wrong. Has she ever really been a Jedi?

Windu’s hand slides across his jaw, holds his chin. Finally, he nods, once. Ahsoka holds onto her shields so tightly it feels like she’s slowly strangling herself. He disappears too. 

She turns and walks away when Obi-Wan reaches for her shoulder. 

“Ahsoka,” he hisses. “Ahsoka!”

He follows her. The second she’s sure they’re alone, she whirls on him. “You’re _ not concerned _about Anakin? If he didn’t know where you were, you know he’d stop at nothing to find you and make sure you were okay!” Her voice starts to rise, and Obi-Wan raises his hands, palms out.

“Listen to me,” he tells her. 

In response, she bares her teeth. 

“Stars, you’ve spent too much time with Anakin,” her grandmaster says. “No - no, Ahsoka, look at me and listen.” The words grow harsh edges. That’s a command. 

Sullenly, she meets his gaze. 

“I am not worried for Anakin because I know he is not a hostage,” he says. 

She forgets herself and gapes at him. “But - but he’s not responding to comms!”

Obi-Wan bites the inside of his cheek. “Yes, well. I didn’t want to bring this up in front of the Council. It’s just - Anakin sent a comm before he went dark. Just to me. Saying that he had to get back to the Temple and help with an initiate class.” His eye twitches.

“Oh.” Ahsoka tugs on her tunic. Master Obi-Wan doesn't seem to believe it, and neither does she. He can only be cajoled into helping with the classes by threat or bribery. Most effectively a combination of both. No wonder he didn't want to mention to the Council that Anakin used them as an excuse. Again.

“What we need to do now,” her grandmaster says, brisk, brushing past that subject completely, “is to figure out why the Kavala twins would want to kill Senator Yacen Eliarr. If we want to prove Hafi Tanaar’s innocence.”

Ahsoka nods so quickly she almost pulls a muscle in her neck. She doesn’t want to tell Kaycer and Yuli and Barriss about Hafi. It’ll be terrible. But - maybe if she can give them some sliver of good news along with the mountain of bad. _ Your friend wasn’t a killer. _

No, she was a victim. Ahsoka squeezes her eyes closed. 

Obi-Wan has gone to confer with Inspector Chun. A Senate Guard comes through the arched entrance way and starts to make a beeline for Master Kenobi. She intercepts. “I’m Padawan Tano. What is it?”

He glances at Obi-Wan’s back, but shrugs. “We’re going over the scene one last time, and found this. Serial number is registered to a Jedi ID.”

Ahsoka holds her hand out, and the Senate guard drops it into her palm. 

Her heart grows suddenly heavy, like it’s turned to stone, terraformed within the cavity of her chest. _ No. _

It’s Anakin’s comm. 


	5. Chapter 5

Daranelle huddles into herself. She is tucked in the corner, next to Liria, the speechwriter, and Yusahn, Riyo’s personal assistant. Riyo is leaned against the opposite wall of the dingy basement room. Alone, with the single light that hangs from a metal chain dangling above her. Illuminating her for the camera. 

The Jedi lies sprawled over the floor to Riyo’s left. A few feet away from Nell. She can see his chest moving, thank the Mother Galaxy.

The hovering camera droid comes in close. “This is Senator Riyo Chuchi,” that awful woman says, with clear and perfect enunciation, sounding like a teacher instructing a pupil in the finer ways of arithmetic. “Tell us about your crimes, Senator Chuchi.”

Riyo’s lavender face is composed. The lower rim of her eyes are red, but her voice is steady when it comes. “I have committed no crimes. I have served my people to the best of my ability, and I will continue to do so.”

It was about the Planetary Defense Committee, Senator Yacen had told Yusahn, when he had him set up the meeting with Riyo. “He has an old friend who wants to discuss Mothma’s peace initiative,” the personal assistant told her. “And you know Riyo hasn’t made up her mind just yet. It might help.”

The woman hadn’t introduced herself when they entered. Daranelle thought she might be the old friend, until Yacen introduced the Jedi. She had waited until they were all seated to speak. As if she’d called the meeting. Nell remembers being annoyed, though she strived not to show it. 

“My name is Syl Kavala,” the woman said. “And this is my twin brother.” Pointing out the dark-haired man with a mouth like a knife slash. “Nan.”

The names hadn’t meant anything to Daranelle, but Riyo Chuchi had gone rigid. “Excuse me?”

Yacen Eliarr had stood up. “Hafi,” he’d said. “Why did you bring them here?”

And then - Nell bites the inside of her cheek hard. 

Syl Kavala’s voice lashes like a whip as she interrogates Riyo for the camera. “Did you or did you not vote in favor of the Military Creation Act?”

“Yes,” Riyo says. Her lip twitches, like she wants to continue speaking. Daranelle can see the way she is digging her fingernails deep into the muscle of her thigh. The camera is too high up. 

Kavala taps her own fingers against the table. “Will you not defend yourself?” 

“I need not defend myself, for I have committed no crimes.”

That seems to irritate their captor. Riyo won’t put on a public display. It’s not the Pantoran way, and if it isn’t Pantoran tradition, then it is not happening. 

Daranelle knows this. She’s worked as part of Senator Chuchi’s administrative staff for three standard years now, even though she’s from Ryloth. Riyo had hired her for her background in Republic law, her studies under the judgeship of Qilmantin Lespo. She’d sat in on a hundred different criminal proceedings, for bounty hunters, smugglers, murderers.

And all that knowledge tastes like bitter ashes, as their captor conducts this farce of a trial for an unseen audience. 

“You will confess,” Syl Kavala says. Her certainty sends a chill down Nell’s spine. “But for now, we shall turn to the crimes of the Jedi. More numerous than the Republic wants you to know.” The woman shakes her head. “We will be speaking of a certain Jedi. Anakin Skywalker. General of the Outer Rim.”

Daranelle’s skin goes cold, blood suddenly leached from the surface, all of it racing toward her heart, rushing through her brain. She jerks her head back around to look at the unconscious Jedi with new eyes. _ General Skywalker? That’s Anakin Skywalker? _

Now she understands Riyo’s stricken expression when they carted him in. They’d heard the struggle outside the door. Nell had tried to scream for help, but they’d all been gagged. It came out muffled. The other one - the brother, had slapped her across the face. Daranelle had swallowed back blood and tears.

To have Anakin Skywalker here, captured - maybe executed - what would that do to the war effort? Not just the loss of a skilled Jedi General. But to have his murder live, viewed around the Republic, on the very Holonet that made his a household name? In the very basement of the symbol of Republic power and solidarity?

It would cripple them. For how long, Nell doesn’t know, can’t begin to guess. Long enough to lose a battle, or two. Long enough to cause unrest on some key planets. An erosion of faith, something that would turn the tide of the war, slow. A maddeningly slow descent into chaos.

Syl Kavala comes in close to the hovering holocam to deliver her next sentence. “I charge him with murder. Most heinous, most foul, murder.”

“You lie!” Riyo snaps, her well-bred Pantoran control breaking for a moment. 

Beneath the camera’s lens, hidden at her side, the woman makes a swift gesture with her hand. Her twin Nan crouches down and plants a fist in Riyo’s side, under the ribs. She falls over, gasping silently, mouth wide and stretched in a rictus of pain. Nell bites back another useless scream. 

“Of course there are the hundreds of civilians he and his Jedi brethren have slaughtered in this unjust war. But I speak of a specific crime. The murder of a Senator that dared to break ranks, to change his mind, to ask for peace.”

At first, Nell doesn’t understand. The woman keeps talking, and then it slowly comes together, the pieces combining into a twisted, backwards version of what truly happened.

“Senator Yacen Eliarr was murdered in his office by a Jedi assassin. An assassin sent by Anakin Skywalker, armed with a lightsaber and armored with the false righteousness of their corrupt Order.” 

Nell closes her eyes. The blade had been greenish-yellow, and it hummed, shivering across her skin. She had never seen a lightsaber before. Not up close. Only in holovids. And those didn’t capture the way it seared the flesh that it severed, an instant cauterization. The scent of singed hair. The ease with which it could cut through bone.

She had never spoken to a Jedi, either. Until Hafi Tanaar had entered the meeting room, unsmiling, serious, greeting Senator Eliarr with a perfunctory and shallow bow over her long elegant fingers. Her eyes had been sunken and dull. The lightsaber that would shortly slice Eliarr apart was attached to her belt, unlit. Nell hadn’t given it a second thought. 

The woman lowered her voice. “And when she was done, to cover up his crimes, to make sure the assassin never spoke a word, he slit her throat.” The disgust is palpable in her tone. And, Nell thinks, true. Not the accusation she levers against Skywalker. Just the disgust, the seething, slimy hatred. 

Syl walks to the Jedi and lets the camera follow her. It pans the length of his tall form. “He killed three men before we were able to bring him here for trial. He was vicious. Out of control. A rabid dog that slipped his master’s leash. And the other Jedi are just like him. They need to be brought to heel.”

She kicks him on the thigh. He stirs, gradually. Grumbles deep in his throat. Nan comes over, limping heavily, and props him up. Flicks him on the side of his head, until his eyes flutter open.

“Will you answer for your crimes?” Syl Kavala demands.

Skywalker only blinks lazily up at her. He doesn’t seem capable of forming any words. 

Syl directs the camera away as soon as it’s obvious she won’t get the show she’s looking for. Her mouth is creased into a line. 

Must have given him too many drugs, Nell thinks. Good. 

She walks away, back towards the single light. “I ask this of the Senate,” Syl says, with a grandiose sweep of her arm. “Agree to the prosecution of every Senator who voted in favor of the Military Creation Act, under the charge of gross negligence to the safety of Republic citizens.”

That isn’t even a real charge. There’s no such statute. Nell feels bile coming up in her throat. She had suspected it, but it’s obvious now. This trial is all showmanship.

“Agree to the dissolution of the Grand Army of the Republic,” Syl Kavala continues. “And agree to outlaw the organization that calls itself the Jedi Order.” She folds her hands in front of her, as if she hasn’t just asked for the world. “If the Senate agrees, they will escape their punishment. If not… we will bring the end of the war ourselves, in flames.”

She says nothing about the Jedi having a chance of escaping punishment. Nan leaves the camera floating, just touches a button, and a green light flashes to red. “Should upload automatically,” he says to Syl.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Nell croaks. Her voice scrapes her throat raw. “You know they’re not going to do any of that. You’re going to kill us and punish them anyway.”

“Now, don’t be a spoilsport,” the woman tells her. She unwinds her mask to smile at Daranelle. Her face is sculpted, with elegant features and sweeping black brows. “All good things come to those who wait. And I have waited seventeen long years for this.”


	6. Chapter 6

“Master Obi-Wan, you have to see this,” Ahsoka insists.

Her muscles are tensed, frame pulled so taut that her limbs are quivering. Obi-Wan stops what he’s doing, literally dropping the stack of file evidence right from his fingers, letting the papers fall across the surface of the desk. He’d been searching through Senator Eliarr’s reports, notes from his recent meetings, the amendments and bills he’d proposed from the last six years. Trying to find any reason why a pair of antiwar terrorists would try to kill him. 

There was nothing. If anything, Yacen Eliarr was the kind of senator that Nan and Syl Kavala should have been supporting. He took every opportunity to argue for peace - though he had voted in favor of the Military Creation Act, he seemed to have engaged in a complete turnaround within a few months. Regret, maybe. Or a growing understand of what a galaxy-wide war truly meant. 

“What is it?” he asks quickly. 

“They found something,” she explains. “At the crime scene. In Senator Eliarr’s office.”

“What?” he repeats, tone growing sharp. 

She doesn’t respond, just holds out her hand. In it, she clasps a Temple comm. Could be any Jedi’s. 

Except. This one has a blue stripe painted down the side. Little white zigzags along the length. 

He’d let Ahsoka and Rex do that, while they were in for a long ride in hyperspace. On his own, and then on the comm he’d stolen from Obi-Wan’s belt, on which Ahsoka painted an angry caricature of Mace Windu. They’d all been sniggering, and when Obi-Wan walked in, looking for that very comm, they peered up at him with terribly neutral expressions. 

It’s Anakin’s. He understands everything Ahsoka hasn’t just said. 

Rex, now standing at attention to his left, frowns. He clearly recognizes the device too. “That’s the General’s, right? Is it a lead?”

Ahsoka’s mouth turns down at the corners. She shakes her head mutely. 

Obi-Wan clenches his jaw tight, then releases. “Anakin left that office before us. He didn’t come back. He couldn’t have left his comm there.”

“Then…?” Rex trails off. 

“Someone took the comm from him and hid it there.” Ahsoka answers. She seems to pulse with urgency, her montrals vibrating. “They sent the message from Anakin, didn’t they?”

“That seems like the only reasonable conclusion,” Obi-Wan manages. There is something caught in his throat, a tangle of sharp thorns. 

He’d just told the Council he wasn’t concerned about Anakin. The Force is playing one of its cruel jokes. 

Ahsoka’s large blue eyes are staring up at him, waiting for him to say something, do something. A thought does occur to Obi-Wan. “The person who sent the comm had to have been at the scene while Anakin was there. Maybe they followed him from it.”

“How do you know?” Rex frowns, crosses his arms over his chest, over the white plastiarmor that gleams under the fluorescents. 

“Anakin told me he was going to the Temple while we stood outside Eliarr’s office. No - not told me. He shouted it, by the Force.”

“They heard him,” Ahsoka finishes the thought. “And used that. Then went back and hid the comm in the room? Why?”

“Didn’t want to be caught in possession of it, probably,” Rex reasons. 

Those thorns in his throat have moved down, snaked through his windpipe, grown roots in his stomach. This whole time - this whole time, he’s been relaxed, composed. Certain of Anakin’s safety. Waiting patiently for his padawan to contact him, knowing it would come at any moment. 

Instead - he’s been held hostage. They took his comm off him. Did they take his lightsaber, too? Deactivate his metal arm? Deal a savage blow to his head, leaving him insensate, blood welling from his nose -

Obi-Wan blows out a breath. “It was a deception. Just simple disinformation, I assume. To confuse us when we most need solid information.”

Ahsoka’s gaze is shuttered when she looks up at him. “Like we did on Cabaron.”

She isn’t wrong. There were rebel cells within the stronghold of Ul-Saan, the capital city. But they were scattered, had trouble communicating, especially after the GAR occupation began. Obi-Wan had come up with the idea. Anakin, who had been on the ground, while Obi-Wan remained hovering just out of atmo with the blockade, had executed the campaign.

They had planted messages, purporting to be from other rebel cells, setting up meeting points that later turned into ambushes by clones. They had done their best to cultivate a feeling of disorientation, uncertainty. Distrust.

He lets that memory stew. A nudge in the Force tells him it is important. 

Inspector Chun hails him, arms flailing, at odds with her previous composure. “Master Jedi!”

Rex and Ahsoka are almost stepping on his heels. Chun shoves a datapad into his hands. “They’ve released the video.”

Obi-Wan listens intently. Senator Chuchi is alive, and unbowed. The woman is Syl Kavala, he’s positive. The voice matches that in the other videos the Senate Guard had compiled for him. Recruitment and rhetoric, mostly. It had puzzled Obi-Wan, and this new video does not clarify anything for him. 

Her rhetoric is still garbled, indistinct, a mass of raw edges, dark feeling. It makes little sense, and he suspects it is only an attempt to project an illusion of justification over the chaotic tumble of hatred he can perceive in her eyes. 

There is no previous indication that Syl and Nan Kavala’s operation is particularly sophisticated. To go from being an annoyance, a nuisance, and to leap up to this level, threatening to murder a Senator? It’s baffling.

Then she mentions Anakin, and his heart trips over itself. The camera reveals his body, prone at first until they make him sit. He is pale, lids fluttering, then open. Obi-Wan examines his former padawan closely. His tanned cheeks are flushed, his hair a tousled mess. There is a strange sheen over his blue eyes. A distance within, as if he has removed himself from the proceedings, as if he is a galaxy away. 

“He’s drugged,” Rex says flatly. “Look at him. Sedative.”

“It would take more than a sedative to bring down a Jedi Knight,” Obi-Wan argues.

Inspector Chun breaks in. “I processed the - the other scene, like you asked. The one in the closet. We took a blood sample. Did a priority scan. And there was a highly illegal substance present. A compound that has been rumored to be a - ” Her voice drops low. “A Force suppressant.”

It feels like a bucket of ice water has been dumped on his head. _ Where in the name of the ninth Corellian hell did they get a Force suppressant? _

Someone is paying them, he’s certain of it now. Bankrolling them, turning Syl and Nan Kavala from marginal antiwar activist into credible terrorist threat. This was not a random attack, this was not a spur of the moment decision, though no doubt they’d like him to believe it is the direct result of the GAR offensive on Cabaron. No, this was planned. Cabaron is an excuse.

His thoughts jump to Padawan Tanaar. The Force suppressant had to have been for her. They hadn’t expected Anakin, he’s sure of it. No one expects Anakin. 

Ahsoka said that Hafi’s creche-mate, Kaycer, told her that Hafi was planning on going offworld. If the group she’d joined hadn’t liked that, maybe they’d decided to force her involvement. It would hurt both the Order and the Republic if a Jedi, former or not, were to be associated with a violent anti-war movement. 

If they had a Force suppressant, they hadn’t needed her cooperation. They had her lightsaber, which was all the proof they needed to accuse the Jedi of Senator Eliarr’s murder. But even without a lightsaber, a Jedi is not defenseless. Hafi must have retaliated, at some point. 

And they killed her for it. 

Obi-Wan calls the Council. This cannot wait, not anymore. 

“They have Anakin,” he says, holding onto his composure by the skin of his teeth. “We have visual contact. A video. They have likely administered a Force suppressant and a sedative. We need to find him immediately.”

“That is, of course, our priority,” Windu says. 

“It’s not just - I am concerned for the safety of the hostages,” Obi-Wan tries to explain. That gets a round of blank stares. “A Force suppressant has been used on Anakin once before. They are not very effective, and they have a number of strange side-effects. To combine that with a sedative… it will not incapacitate him. Only confuse him, very badly. He cannot control himself or his hold on the Force in this state.”

Mace Windu speaks first. “Obi-Wan - what? I remember your report, and the side-effects you mentioned did not seem as troubling as you make them out to be now.”

“I have a tendency toward understatement.” It’s the only thing he can think to say, an inappropriate quip, like Anakin has possessed him through their Force bond. Though that is impossible, given that his padawan is dazed, drugged, and bound. Panic starts to creep in, around the duracrete walls of his composure, a strangling ivy.

“I see.” Windu is not impressed. “Is his control truly that poor? That he would harm himself and others?”

“You don’t understand,” Obi-Wan snaps. “Anakin doesn’t feel the Force the way we do. The way that anyone else does. It is a supernova for him, where we might only see the distant flash of light.”

“What are you trying to say, Master Obi-Wan?” Ahsoka interrupts. “You think Anakin could accidentally hurt them?”

“If he tries to escape? Yes, I think he could.”

He wished he didn’t know that. He wished he’d never have to consider how Anakin could be turned into a weapon, that he didn’t know of Anakin’s capacity to injure. To kill, and cause pain. He wished Anakin didn’t know it. How his precious, strong gift of the Force could be sharpened and wielded like a blade. 

But often - that bladesharp power is the only thing standing between Obi-Wan and a nasty exsanguination. 

He holds onto Anakin, no matter how deeply he cuts into Obi-Wan’s flesh. And it does. Like he’s swallowed a handful of razorblades. Sweet, bright, beautiful Anakin, so beautiful it squeezes Obi-Wan’s heart in his chest, suffocating him with a nameless and formless desire. Beauty even in his rage, in the terrible, unthinking cruelty.

In the dust, the haze, the ruined landscape of Ul-Saan, he’d had to face it for the first time. Truly had to stare at it, right in front of him. Anakin’s potential for destruction. 

The hovering sands had blocked out the light of Cabaron’s eternally bright sun. Obi-Wan stepped gingerly among the broken mosaics, the plants ripped out by the root, the shambling carcasses of the houses. 

That bloodless determination was in Anakin’s gaze, his electric blue eyes the only thing with any color among the false dusk. “It had to be done, Obi-Wan,” he’d said, and then caught his master before he could fall. 


	7. Chapter 7

Riyo leans over as far as she can, in her bindings. “Anakin? Skywalker, can you hear me?” she murmurs. 

He grunts, face contorting as he tries to roll to the left. One cheek is pressed to the floor. His own hands are at the small of his back, bound with heavier cuffs than their own. Slowly, his eyes flutter open. They are blue, Nell sees. Blue and glazed over. Shaggy lengths of light hair fall over his forehead. He licks his lips and mutters, hoarse, “Water. Thirsty.”

The Senator glances around, mouth twisted. “I’m sorry. I can’t - I can’t.”

There are cups sitting on the table by the riveted, rusting metal wall. None of their captors had offered them any water. Daranelle can only think that it’s because there is no intention of letting any of them survive this. 

Riyo follows Nell’s gaze. Something flickers across her face, probably akin to Nell’s own suspicions. Anakin Skywalker’s head flops that way too. His eyes narrow, almost going crosswise, hands wriggling in his cuffs. Grunting, he manages to scoot an inch on the cold stone floor, towards the table.

One of their captors notices. “Stay put,” the humanoid male shouts. 

“He needs water,” Nell dares to say. Their guard snorts. He snatches the thermos that sits next to the cups, and goes to drink it, a petty gesture. 

But when he raises it to his mouth, an unseen force tugs it away. The thermos goes flying, landing next to Skywalker’s prone form. 

It’s not the only thing that goes flying. The guard himself tumbles forward, out of the chair he was perched on, landing with a hard thump. The cups ricochet around the room, cracking when they slam into the filthy floor. Even the pipes lining the ceiling creak and groan. Bolts whiz through the air, and one of the pipes springs a sudden leak, letting yellowish water drip out onto the head of the other guard. The Lasat female shrieks, spits, and jumps from her seat, wiping off her short fur. 

“What in the blazes - ” the human guard swears, staggering to his feet, blaster in his palm. “The suppressant - where’s the suppressant, Gargrey?”

“Syl has it,” the Lasat snaps. “He’s not due for another dose yet! He’s supposed to have twelve hours left.”

Anakin groans into the duracrete. He doesn’t even seem to notice what he just did. “I would give him some water,” Riyo says shakily. “Unless you want him to destroy the entire wall next.”

“I’m not getting near that freak of nature,” the Lasat declares. 

The human guard has stepped away too. “You do it,” he tells Riyo. 

Riyo lifts her cuffed hands and an eyebrow both. The guards exchange glances, before the human comes over, giving Anakin a wide berth. He unlocks Riyo’s cuffs, then fingers the butt of his blaster in a silent warning. She nods. Crawls over, and takes the thermos. Tilting Skywalker’s head to the side, she starts to dribble in water between his lips. He hums contentedly when she’s gotten out as much as she’s able. 

When she’s done, Riyo scoots over to Daranelle, Liria, and Yusahn. “I don’t know what’s happening,” the Senator whispers. “They gave him a Force suppressant, but…” 

Nell has been thinking of it. “They must have given it to the Jedi girl as well.”

“Is that why she couldn’t save Yacen?” Liria murmurs. The Lasat guard looks over, and she ducks her head. 

The young Jedi had stirred from her dazed silence, after Syl Kavala had unclipped the lightsaber from the girl’s belt and approached the senator from Haruun Kal. “No,” she had said, a breath of a word. Nell hadn’t been able to hear it. She’d watched the shape of it form on the girl’s lips. 

The blade shimmered into being in Syl’s hand. Nell had fallen back against the wall, her chair clattering to the floor. Liria had slipped out of her seat too, then scrabbled on the marble floor, into the corner. 

The Jedi - Hafi, Yacen had called her, with a fond, paternal smile. One that had washed off of his face when he looked at the blank mask of hers. 

Syl rested the point just above his chest. Yacen had been stone still. “I thought you wanted to speak of peace,” he said. 

“There will be no peace for me in this life,” Kavala told him. “The only peace to be found is in death. And I wish you great joy of it.” She swiped the blade from shoulder to hip, a downward slash, a simple flick of her wrist. 

They had all screamed. 

Syl stood over Yacen Eliarr’s body. Dropped the lightsaber onto his chest, and spit on the hilt. Hafi had reached out, grasping with her hand, fingers closing on air. “No,” she had said again, the syllable dead and dull. She had looked at her hand as if it was a stranger’s. 

Nan Kavala was behind her, a blade in his hand as well, but metal. When Hafi rose out of her chair and stumbled forward, he’d stopped her. The movement the girl made then was smooth, practiced, a motion done a thousand times before. She grabbed his wrist and flipped him forward, twisting the knife from him. He snatched at her ankle, trying to pull her down, and she stabbed him in the hip. 

Syl snarled, wrestled the knife from the girl’s grip, and tore the blade across her throat. 

Nell had barely been able to see for the horrified tears. 

“She tried to save him,” she says. “She did.”

“You’re right, Nell. And one thing is sure,” Riyo Chuchi says, nodding at Skywalker. “He’s not like any Jedi I’ve ever known.”

They fall silent when the door squeals, grating against the metal lip, revealing the Kavala twins.

“Yours are in place?” Syl asks, words smooth as silk. 

“They’re wired up,” Nan replies. 

“Wired up?” Riyo repeats, her pitch spiking high. “What do you mean?”

“You won’t feel a thing,” Syl reassures her. “Not here, in the center of the blast.”

“You’re going to blow up the Senate Dome?” Nell’s as shrill as Riyo. Liria starts sobbing. Peace in death. No, this couldn’t be happening.

Anakin Skywalker starts to mumble under his breath. Riyo squeezes Nell’s hand. 

Syl gestures at Nan, who props him back up again, looping an arm around his neck. Skywalker keeps talking. It’s almost all nonsense, it means nothing to Daranelle. “Obi-Wan,” she hears. “Tell him.”

Then he starts crying. “Don’t kill her,” he pleads with Syl. For a split second, Nell thinks he’s talking about them. But he can’t even focus his eyes on the woman in front of him. 

Riyo dares to crawl over. “His pupils,” she whispers. “Look at them. They keep getting bigger and smaller - then, big, just now!”

They all wait, holding their breath. Even Syl and Nan Kavala are staring at the Jedi, eyes wide and horrified. 

He screams, splitting the silence, ear-shattering. Nell screams too, she can’t help it. As do Liria and Yusahn. Riyo scrambles backward, on her hands. 

The stone walls of the basement grow cracks, shattering just as the silence had. Syl leaps to her feet. “No!” she cries. “No, we aren’t ready - the bombs are armed! If he pulls down the walls, they’ll go off - ”

Nan slaps Skywalker. He doesn’t stop moaning and crying. His limbs convulse, as if a lightning storm brews under the thin veil of skin. 

Riyo reverses direction, and clambers toward him, takes up the same position she had when she fed him water. “Senator!” Nell shrieks. 

She combs her hands through his hair. Hums under her breath. Holds his trembling hands. And by the Mother of All Stars, it works. Nell can taste sour adrenaline in her throat. Liria clings to her side, and she wraps her arms around the older woman. They huddle together and watch the rush of power that had come to Anakin slide away, into the ether from where he’d seemed to summon it. 


	8. Chapter 8

“You’re certain?” Obi-Wan stares the Senate Guard down, until the younger man is only able to squeak out an affirmative. 

Chief Hamandi approaches. “The lad’s right. We’ve scanned the Dome,” he informs Master Obi-Wan. “And we received multiple contacts. From the lower levels. Within the inner shield, and along the outer shield. A detonation network.”

“Bombs,” Ahsoka breathes. “They’ve wired the whole dome. And the rayshields - they’ll capture all of the blast. Keep it contained. Make the blast that much stronger.”

“By the sainted suns.” Inspector Chun covers her mouth briefly, with one hand. “We need an extensive search of the lower levels within this area of the rayshield. We’ve got to find those explosives.”

“Hell of a punishment,” Rex mutters. 

“And there’s something else,” Chun says. “I looked into that override code. The only way they could have gotten it to work is if they were within five hundred feet of the rayshield generator.”

“Then - that means they’re in the basement!” Ahsoka exclaims. “They’re right here. They’ve been here the whole time. They set up the bombs, and then went to the generator and activated the shield. And once they activated it, they couldn’t have gotten out.”

“No, it’s not possible,” Chun argues. “They couldn’t have gotten to the generator itself. It’s under heavy security. The access from the basement is strictly limited. There’s a secure perimeter for at least a thousand feet in every direction.”

“But what about the vertical direction?” Obi-Wan points up with a finger. “It’s not just the sides of the generator. The radius must extend all around. A sphere. What’s above the generator?

Ahsoka is following along with this train of thought. And then trips over a metaphorical rock. “Senator Yacen Eliarr’s office,” she gasps. “That’s why they targeted him. They needed an office that would be within the radius.”

Obi-Wan curses. Rex doesn’t flinch, but Inspector Chun looks as if he’d spit. “Right below our feet.”

“How did they know the override code in the first place?” Rex lifts his hands. “That’s what I don’t get.”

“Perhaps the Kavalas have another associate. The same person who sent the comm from Anakin’s device after he was captured. Someone familiar with the inner workings of the Dome.” Obi-Wan lets Inspector Chun and Chief Hamandi work out what he’s implying. 

The Head of the Senate Guard turns to stare out of the window. Inspector Chun’s face screws up. “A traitor. You - ” she cuts off, snapping her jaw together, teeth clicking. To her credit, the Inspector does not argue. She paces, forward and then back. “If you’re correct about this,” she says, dubious but willing to consider, “It’ll be someone who has high enough clearance to get into the more secure Senatorial offices. That’s how they could have gotten the override code.”

Rex traces a finger over his lip. “I thought only the Supreme Chancellor or the Head of the Senate Guard could activate the rayshields.”

“It’s an extra protective measure,” Chun explains. “If the Supreme Chancellor has activated the emergency protocols, then the Dome is sealed. But in the event that some of the hostiles have gotten inside before the area was secured, the override code will trigger the lowering of the second shield, in the center of the Dome, covering a smaller area. An inner sanctum. Which includes the Chancellor’s office, and the Audience Chamber.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute.” Chief Hamandi raises his arms. “Why did they ever leave Senator Eliarr’s office? If they were going to hold Senator Chuchi hostage, they could have done it from there. Had one of them go out, set the bombs, and come back. Then they send the override code from the office itself. It’s within the second shield. The inner sanctum. We wouldn’t have been able to reach them.”

“You’re right,” Rex says. “Why would they want the Senate Guard to find Eliarr and go on high alert?”

Obi-Wan doesn’t chew on his lip. Not like her master does. But from his tense jaw, it looks like he desperately wants to. “Maybe they didn’t want the Senate Guard specifically. They used a lightsaber. It was deliberate. They wanted the Jedi to respond. To be caught in the blast.”

Ahsoka feels a thrum in the Force that tells her Obi-Wan’s right. “Then that’s why they had to have another conspirator involved. They needed someone that could come and go from Senator Eliarr’s office without suspicion. To send the override code to the generator once we arrived.”

“We do have a traitor,” Chun says grimly.

Ahsoka pulls on Obi-Wan’s sleeve and lets her voice drop an octave. “It’s like Cabaron. Again. This is what we did to destroy the hideouts of the rebel cells. The detonation network underground. It can’t be a coincidence.”

“I had come to much the same conclusion.” He sounds tired. “This is too deliberate.” Obi-Wan turns to Chun. “Do you have a list of Republic officials that assisted with the offensive on the Outer Rim planet of Cabaron?”

“If you think that’ll help.” Chun waits for him to nod, then shrugs. She grabs her datapad. Ahsoka taps her feet restlessly on the floor while they wait. 

She’d been in the upper city, organizing the evacuation, while Anakin and half their battalion patrolled the lower, setting the charges. 

Ahsoka remembers the occupation. Climbing into her cot every night, fighting back frustrated, miserable tears. Though it wasn’t really night. The suns never went down on Cabaron, only arced through the sky, back and forth, dipping just past the horizon before beginning their ascent anew. Neverending daylight. She’d quickly learned to cover her eyes with a bandana when trying to sleep topside.

The evacuation hadn’t gone well. None of the city dwellers wanted to leave. They spit at the clones. Attacked them. Called Ahsoka terrible things, made her feel awful. They resisted the mandatory evacuation, every way they could. And the rebel cells did all they could to make the safe transport of the civilians impossible. Ahsoka tried to save them, tried to hold them off, tried to just keep people alive, rebel or civilian or clone.

She’d reported the problems they encountered, but the resistance didn’t matter. “This planet must have a Republic presence,” Mace Windu had said. The Council never wavered. “You must do whatever it takes to secure the surface.”

“No alternative, there is,” Master Yoda had gripped the head of his gimer stick. “Any measure, you must take.”

And so they did. The most drastic measure, it turned out. The last card they had to play. Complete, utter destruction. 

Ahsoka had to evacuate with the last group. She’d injured her leg, when a rebel attack exploded in the center of a crowd, and the civilians panicked, mobbing the exits. Fives had helped her limp to a shuttle. “Faster!” she remembers him shouting, over the incessant noise of the ion cannons, as the yellow blasts shot through the blue sky, shining brighter than the suns. Distant fire could be seen above, as the rear guard of the blockade begin to fall, star destroyers shredded where they sat, spinning in a slow gravity. Her lungs had felt weighed down with sand, her throat raw. Pain twisted through her leg with each forward step. 

They’d made it on the transport. Ahsoka had pressed her face to the port window, hacking and coughing, and watched the thousand pillars of Ul-Saan tumble into the growing cloud of dust. 

Ahsoka steps closer to Master Obi-Wan’s side. His Force presence brushes against her mind. Soft and soothing, blotting out any memory of the biting, stinging red sands, churned up by the charges. 

“Got it,” Inspector Chun says, flashing them a list. “You think the traitor was there?”

“I do,” Obi-Wan says. 

“There’s over five hundred. Can we narrow it down?” 

“Not a clone, not a Jedi. Not a Senator.” He tugs on his russet beard. “Cross-check anyone that has security clearance high enough to be present on an active crime scene with a home planet in that system.”

Chun hums. “There’s twenty.”

“Perfect.” Obi-Wan holds out a hand and the Inspector drops the datapad into it. 

“What are you gonna do?” Ahsoka asks. Nervousness flutters in the lower half of her stomach. His Force presence has gone - totally disappeared. Impenetrable, cold as granite, immovable. She can get no hint of his next action, no hint of anything at all. The absence shakes her. Not soft or soothing, not anymore. 

“I will handle the matter of this traitor.” Chun goes to protest but he bulls over her. “I must do this thing, and the Force will guide me. I sense it.” The authority the statement bends them all like reeds in the wind, inclining their heads to him. Even Chief Hamandi. No argument can be made. There is steel in Master Obi-Wan's spine. He inclines his head in return, the barest inch. 

“Ahsoka, you will go with the teams of the Guards searching the lower floors for the explosive devices. Disarm any that you find. I will keep in contact.” He steps closer. Obi-Wan is not particularly tall, and still he manages to tower over her, if only in presence. “If I tell you to run, Ahsoka, I want you to abandon whatever you are doing. Whomever you are with. You run, and take cover in the most well-defended place you can find.”

She opens her mouth. He cuts her off. “That is an order from your General, Commander. Do you understand me?” Ahsoka firms her stance and gives a sharp nod. One given to a superior officer. Obi-Wan examines her, and she feels a slight shiver, like she’s being given a medical scan. “Good.”

She does not ask what he’ll do when he finds the traitor, and he does not say. 


	9. Chapter 9

His vision slides from grey to black, then to white, a great swirling mass of shadow and not-shadow. There are voices around him. The woman is talking about a detonation sequence. 

Anakin tries to tell her. “The evacuation,” he says, but it comes out all mashed together. The evacuation wasn’t complete. Obi-Wan kept saying that. _ Anakin, no, you can’t. It’s not complete. Stop the detonation! _

Then his head is jerked up, cold painful hands pressing into his neck, settling over the base of his skull like a spider, fingers in his hair. 

There’s a face in front of him. It is a woman. “You have to tell Obi-Wan,” he says. Anakin knows there is something urgent his master needs to know. _ Tell him I’m sorry. Tell him I had to. _

He’d been in the undercity for weeks. Ul-Saan was two cities, really. Ul, the upper city, was bathed in permanent golden light, between the red dunes, with its famous towering blue and purple pillars, the precious silver water spilling over their tops, into the pools at the base, filled with flowers and reeds. A thousand of them, lining the avenues, the squares, all miniature oases. 

The other city of Saan was beneath the surface, a shadow reflection of its counterpart, cloaked in permanent twilight. The base of the pillars extended that far down, but there was no intricate tile to cover their bulk. No fountains or flowers. They sat in the bedrock like stalactites, spearing up toward the surface. Grey and forbidding. The lichen glowed, down there. A faint greenish light. 

The rebels had made the undercity their base. That’s where they found the ion cannon, eventually. And the bombs. 

Ahsoka was manning the upper city command base. Anakin was stuck under the ground. They switched off every week. It was too much, for someone who was not Saani, not native to the warrens and the tunnels. Both Anakin and Ahsoka are diurnal species. Ulaari, they called them. Sundwellers. Desert planets, he knows, they follow the rhythm of the stars.

The twin suns of Tatooine had determined every motion Anakin made, when he was a kid. When to rise, when to eat, when to work, when to sleep. Watto was the third sun that bound his life. 

Those suns hover now, above him, blinding him. Twins. Anakin can smell the strong, almost medicinal scent of the quick-growing grass that appears in the transient shadows of rock formations, in the canyons outside of Mos Espa, disappearing below the surface as the planet turns. The sands boil beneath his feet, the grass nips at his ankles, tugging him, tipping him up, sliding him back down. He falls between the canyon walls.

His mother screams for him. “No,” he pleads. “No. Don’t kill her. Don’t kill her.”

But a monster rises from the dunes, a black dragon, and swallows her whole. Then it consumes the suns, yellow and blue, and it drinks the eternal sands. Tatooine disappears down its gullet. Then another planet, and another. The dragon roars its fury. 

Anakin echoes it, with a cry. The Force contracts within him, then expands, pushing outward, a concussive force, cracking apart his ribs.

Then the rains come, soothing him, cutting trails down his face, parting his hair, like gentle fingers. Soft music is in his ears, as the drops dance upon the surface of the heated sand. 

Time drifts away from him, blurring. 

He falls back under the shadow of Ul-Saan. 

Rex had been grim, on the edge of panic. The control panel was open in front of him, wires spilling out. The machinery pumped, grinding and trembling. Anakin could feel the heat rising from the pulse of the engine. It shuddered, clanged, and discharged another ion blast. The ion cannon’s opening was far above the surface. Hidden among the dunes, and aimed skyward. He knew the blast had hit its target when the shouts came over the commlink. Obi-Wan barking orders, from miles overhead. Clones yelling, the shields of the star destroyers sizzling as the blasts were diluted on their surface. 

The Republic blockade was under attack. From the skin of the planet, the territory that Anakin and his battalion were supposed to have in hand. And also from the Confederacy ships that had jumped in from hyperspace an hour ago. They were shelling Obi-Wan’s command ship from the front. The ion cannon from the back. 

And Obi-Wan wanted him to sit on his thumbs, doing nothing.

“The evacuation isn’t done, Anakin! Only seventy percent of the homes have been cleared - ”

“And if we don’t do this now, we’ll see more than seventy percent casualties for our own men!” Anakin had shouted to be heard over the _ thum-thum-thum _of the ion cannon’s continuous fire.

“Our men know what they’re risking. They are soldiers, they have pledged their lives. The civilians on the ground have not.”

“Are you seriously going to stand there and tell me the clones made a choice to be involved in this war?” Anakin snapped. 

“No, I - Anakin, it’s not that simple. But they _ were _trained for it. Regardless of the circumstances surrounding the clones' creation, we have to acknowledge that these civilians want no part in this war!

“Dooku’s flagship is out there, Obi-Wan. Shooting at you. He’s gonna cut through your fleet from one side while his rebels cut through the other from the planet surface. I’m not gonna sit here and watch you and your men get torn apart!” He turned to Rex and shouted in his face. “Start the detonation sequence!”

The tunnels shook as the charges went off. Each pillar of the upper city made an enormous, earth-shaking boom, as they fell. Anakin hadn’t cared. The whole damn planet could crumble. He wouldn’t let this awful place take everything that mattered. 

Anakin sacrificed Ul-Saan to the gaping maw of the war. 

And then, years or months or minutes later, rain falls on his head. 

Not rain, though. He splutters, choking on water that tastes like sulfur and sewage. The harsh smell zings around in his brain, waking him almost completely. Anakin stares at a woman and a man, standing in front of him. Is this still a dream? They look like copies of each other. 

“My name is Syl Kavala,” the woman says.

“My name is Nan Kavala,” says the man. 

Always twins. Anakin glances between them, bewildered. The last thing he remembers are the darts. The drugs are still active. He realizes when he tries to speak. “Bantha Shit Number One,” he slurs. “Bantha Shit Number Two, for all I care.” The laugh catches in his throat, a ridiculous gurgle.

There is a series of horrified noises from the corner, all in synchrony. 

“You are here to answer for your crimes, Jedi,” the woman-half snarls. 

_ There is no answer. _ He can’t tell if he said that aloud, or if it rebounded through his skull, trapped under the bone. And then - _ I don’t feel like a Jedi. _


	10. Chapter 10

He reads the list of potential conspirators. Uses the Force, throws himself into it. Grabs at the first name it whispers. Tyrin Blackwell. Obi-Wan does not question this. He cannot. There is no time. There is no choice. Anakin weighs on his mind like a stone. 

The way he’d weighed on Obi-Wan that last afternoon in his domicile, before they shipped out to the Outer Rim, to Cabaron. He’d lain across the cushions of the couch. Sprawled out on Obi-Wan’s legs. A warm pressure, blinking sleepy eyes up at him. 

They have hardly touched since they returned. And all at once, Obi-Wan aches for that weight, in his bones. 

Urgency nips at his ankles. He searches the name Tyrin Blackwell on Chun’s datapad. Locates his office, two floors above Senator Eliarr’s. The human man serves in the general administration. Managing logistics, supply lines, human resources. Helping to staff the entire Dome, from the Senate Guard to the custodians. And making sure the GAR is equipped with all the support staff it needs. 

He’d spent six weeks on Cabaron. On the ground, where Anakin’s battalion held the double city in an uncertain grip. 

Obi-Wan grips the pad tight enough to leave lines in his palms. He starts to exit the command station, to go find Tyrin, when he’s hailed yet again by Inspector Chun. Obi-Wan bites down a surge of irritation. 

“The Supreme Chancellor is on the line,” she says, her presence rippling faintly with unease. “He wants to speak to you.”

“Where is he?” Obi-Wan asks. 

“Up in his office. In the inner ring of the shields. He’s stuck there until we sort this out.”

“I can only imagine how pleased he is with that.”

Chun grunts in commiseration, waves him over to the private commlink in Chief Hamandi’s office. 

“Chancellor Palpatine,” he greets the man. 

“Master Kenobi.” The wrinkles on his deeply lined face are pulled tight when he frowns. “I have been briefed on the search for the explosives. But what is this about a hostage situation?”

“Senator Riyo Chuchi and her staff are being held by Syl and Nan Kavala, the heads of a militant antiwar group. As is - as is Anakin.”

The Supreme Chancellor does not look pleased, as far as Obi-Wan can tell from the blue hologram. “Why was I not informed immediately? Why has the search been so delayed?”

“I had reason to believe Anakin had left the Senate Dome, Your Excellency.”

“I see.” Palpatine gives him a look down his nose. “A costly mistake, Master Jedi.” Obi-Wan grinds his molars together. “Kavala, you said?”

“Yes. Though I suspect there is someone else behind them. Someone who has been funding the Kavala twins. They might not even know it.”

“And your suspicions lie in what direction?”

“Count Dooku, perhaps.”

Palpatine pauses, cutting a glance at Obi-Wan. “What makes you say that?”

“This is bold enough for him. To demolish the Senate Dome? It rather sends a message.”

The Chancellor taps his finger against his temple, once, twice. His voice is cold. “It does, rather.”

Obi-Wan gives a jerk of a nod. “Anakin must be recovered,” the older man continues. 

Obi-Wan does not need the Chancellor to tell him that. It is his own apprentice, not Palpatine’s. “Yes,” he says flatly. “I am taking swift action to do just that. If you will excuse me, Supreme Chancellor.”

His mouth purses, like he’s bitten into a lemon. “Very well, Master Kenobi,” he bites out, each word clipped. “I trust you know the consequences will be dire if you fail.”

Obi-Wan shuts off the holocomm without responding. 

A call from the Council comes through. Obi-Wan almost tears his hair out. He answers, intending to be as brief as physically possible. 

“There are explosives beneath the Senate Dome,” he says curtly. The Council members jolt. “I have dispatched Ahsoka to help the Guard search for the bombs and Anakin both.”

“And you?” Windu prods. “Will you not go after your former padawan?”

Within his robes, he clenches his fingers on his wrists. “We have identified a potential traitor to the Republic. Working right here in the Dome, under the Chancellor’s nose. I am going to take him into custody.”

The Masters give him a round of nods. Obi-Wan leaps for the button at the base of the holocomm, ready to terminate the call. 

Windu interrupts him. “I am very gratified to see you have your priorities in order, Master Kenobi. The Republic comes first. I am not sure the same could be said of Skywalker, had your positions been reversed.”

Instead of screaming, Obi-Wan tries to smile. He’s sure the shape is wrong. 

“I trust in the Force,” he manages to choke out, swallowing down bile. _ Because I am the Force, and the Force is me. And stars-be-damned if I let Anakin down. _

Damn the whole galaxy, if Anakin falls. 

Obi-Wan shoves a path through the command post, and goes to find Tyrin Blackwell. Down three stairwells, through a length of corridor that seems to stretch a mile, turn after turn. The time winds tighter and tighter in his gut, twisting until it pounds at the seams of his skull.

And he’s found it.

The door bangs open into the wall. The man inside jumps, dropping a comm onto his desk. “I - ”

“You,” Obi-Wan agrees. He sits down in the chair across from the wooden desk. His limbs tingle, muscles twitching, aching for movement that he suppresses. 

Tyrin tries for nonchalance. “Master Kenobi, I have never had the pleasure.”

“Oh, this is no pleasure, Tyrin Blackwell.” Obi-Wan lets his gaze drill into him. “I don’t want there to be any mistake. This visit can be many things. Not one of them is a pleasure.”

“There must be some confusion - ”

“Your treason is not a matter of doubt. Only your punishment.”

Tyrin Blackwell swipes a shaking hand across his forehead. He laughs without humor. “Alright. Alright,” he says. “Very well. What is it then, Kenobi? You wish to negotiate?”

“That would give the impression that I am willing to concede anything to you,” Obi-Wan replies. “And I’m afraid that is not the case.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I am here to watch you deactivate the bombs your co-conspirators have set beneath the Dome.”

The man leans forward, lets his palms splay across his desk. “I have to disappoint, Master Kenobi, as I have no intention of doing so.”

“You are trapped within the ray shield as well,” Obi-Wan points out. “Were you planning to die?”

“Oh, no. I don’t think so. I have seen enough of death. I’m quite through with it.”

“I don’t think you know anything of death,” he argues. He can hear the knowledge in his voice, soft and unwanted. 

Tyrin sneers at him. “Don’t I?”

Obi-Wan opens his mouth, but Tyrin interrupts him. Words spill in a torrent, until he’s fairly spitting them in the Jedi’s direction. “I’ve seen plenty. More than you think. Do you know what my last assignment was? Administrative liaison attached to a GAR Battalion. The 501st, actually.”

“On Cabaron,” Obi-Wan finishes the thought for him. 

Tyrin licks his lips, slightly taken aback. “Yes. I was there, in the ruins of the capital. I saw what you and your men did to it. How you destroyed it, completely. How you destroyed my _ home. _”

“What happened on Cabaron - I am sorry for it,” Obi-Wan says. “I am.”

Tyrin snorts, a hateful glitter in his brown eyes. 

Obi-Wan thinks of what Anakin had said, standing amid the shattered pillars of Ul-Saan. “I made a choice, Obi-Wan. There was no time to wonder. I saw what had to be done, and I did it.”

He hadn’t been able to reply. Anakin has always been the decisive one. Obi-Wan envies him that. 

His padawan wasn’t standing straight and tall in the video the Separatists had sent. No, he had lain prone, his blue eyes closed, the shadow of a bruise on his cheek. 

It is the double vision of Anakin that he holds within him now. Anakin with the sand whipping into a storm around him, eyes burning a blue as bright as his saber, and Anakin pale and bloodless and in a delirium. _ A choice. _

Remain passive, and let everything that is beautiful fall around you, or take action, and let oneself become all that is ugly and hateful. It is time for a decision, and Obi-Wan makes it. 

He stands, and lets his next words come, lets them fall with all the force and truth of an avalanche. “And if I have to kill you, I will be sorry for that too. I have enough sorrow to spare, but… not enough mercy.” 

He reaches across the desk, touches the younger man on the brow. Tyrin Blackwell stares up at him, swallowing. “This has been a long war,” Obi-Wan tells him. “Very long. I have done things, seen things - I will not lie, Tyrin. They shape my dreams at night, into terrible forms.” He leans forward in his chair, resting his elbows on his knees. “I remember them all. I remember them, but Tyrin, I do not regret them.”

The young man is frozen. Wary. Heart pulsing in his throat like a rabbit. Obi-Wan continues, voice soft. “I need you to know that. I did those things because it was my duty. As a General. To lead the war effort. The second greatest duty of my life.”

The question is in his eyes, and Obi-Wan asks it for him. “Do you know what the first greatest duty of my life is? The one that I owe to my padawan. The boy I raised. Cared for. Protected. Trained. The boy that I have promised everything to. His name is Anakin Skywalker. Do you know where he is, Tyrin? Yes, yes, that’s right, I think you do. He’s in that room that your colleagues have wired to detonate.”

Tyrin presses his lips together. His cheeks are pale. Obi-Wan smiles at him, but it is not a gentle smile, nor kind. “It’s only fair that I tell you this. You deserve a warning, Tyrin. And I’m giving it to you. Listen.” He pulls the lightsaber from his belt. Places it on the desk between them, and ignites the blue blade, a dividing line. 

“I will kill you,” he tells the young man. “If you get in my way, Tyrin, I will kill you. I want you to know this, and to understand how perfectly serious I am. I will do what is necessary to get my - my - ”

He cannot think how to put his relationship to Anakin in any words that will convey every moment that has fallen between them. “My Anakin,” he settles on. “To get Anakin back.”

The blade sits between them, an unspoken threat, a silent promise, until Tyrin Blackwell reaches for his datapad.


	11. Chapter 11

Anakin Skywalker has to be delirious. That is the only reason Daranelle can think that he would be laughing in his captor’s face. “You don’t know anything,” the young man says. “Don’t know me. My crimes.”

Nan Kavala tightens his grip on Anakin’s blond hair. A grimace flits over his open face. Then an incongruous smile. 

Nell almost wishes he was still unconscious. The walls shifted, cracking, settling. He’d almost brought the basement down on top of them, at the height of whatever hallucination he’d been having. 

Syl Kavala crouches in front of Skywalker. "You think I don't know the Jedi? You think my hatred is borne out of ignorance?" Her laugh spears through the air like a rusted vibroblade. "No, I made a great study of the Jedi. After they took my sister."

Riyo's mouth parts. Nell clutches at the hem of her shirt. Syl smirks at them. "Oh, it is a time-honored tradition of the Jedi. If you don't think too hard about it. If it's not your kin they're stealing from the crib."

Anakin blinks at her. "Who?" He still can't seem to form full sentences. Syl Kavala understands what he's asking. 

"Gira Ohnar." Her eyes are dark as coals. Skywalker gives a minute shake of his head. "Don't bother racking your brain," Syl tells him. "No. You won't remember her. She's years gone."

"What happened?" Riyo threads her fingers together, resting in her lap. The golden bells in her hair chime softly. 

"Is it any great mystery?" That is Nan, spitting the words as he shoves the back of Anakin’s head forward. He stands, paces away. "The war." It is a short and pointed explanation, with the weight of a planet behind it. 

Syl rises to her feet and stands next to her brother. "The Jedi took Gira and stripped everything from her but their unnatural Code. They put a weapon into her child's hands and sent her to fight a war for them. She died in the Battle of Geonosis, days before her seventeenth birthday."

Anakin stares at them. “What d’you want me to say?”

“I want you to look me in the face and admit it,” Syl cries. No longer smooth, no longer sneering. “Admit what the Jedi Order is! Admit that it’s always been rotten, at the core, that this war only showed it for what it is!”

Nan strides forward until he's towering over Skywalker. "How many children have you sent to their deaths?"

"How many civilians have you slaughtered?" Syl's voice drops again, now nearly the same timbre as her twin's, their very faces an echo. "How long have you been the Republic's slave?"

Nell sees Anakin grind his teeth. A joint pops, bone against bone, as he crushes the fingers of his flesh hand into a fist. "I'm not a slave," he says, low, a banked fire in the tone, all embers. 

"Aren't you?" Nan sneers at him. "Didn't the Temple take you too? Don't they own you now? Don't you call them Master? Don't they tell you how to act, where to go, who to kill?"

Anakin levers up onto his knees. "I said I'm not a slave!" The single light, a dim bulb, suspended above their heads, begins to sway in an ominous lack of wind, scattering rays of white in every direction. 

Syl draws her blaster and puts it level with Nell's skull in one motion. Abruptly, she stops breathing. 

"Admit it," the woman snarls. "Admit that you've always been their slave. Their dog. Admit it, or I'll send a blaster bolt through one ear and out the other."

Riyo's wide golden eyes are fixed on Nell. She stares helplessly back. Her palms are sweating, but they're cold, so cold. Is this where she's going to die? In the basement of the Senate Dome that she's coveted a seat within since she was half a girl, old enough to dream of Coruscant and glory, the glamour, the shine?

Anakin Skywalker doesn't look at her. "I'm not a slave," he repeats, his words ringing out, final as a death knell. 

Syl Kavala growls at him, grip tightening on the blaster. 

Nell wants to squeeze her eyes shut. She doesn't. If she's headed for the darkness, she wants her last glimpse to be of light, no matter how diffuse, how dim, how tiny and wavering the spark. 

The Jedi reaches out a hand and grips only shadows. His face is twisted, lips screwed to the side, brows low over glowing eyes. Syl chokes. The blaster falls. A whimper escapes, as her windpipe crushes inward in increments.

Nan screams, throws himself at Skywalker. And then that spark, their only light source, shatters, plunging them into darkness.  _ No - the bombs, you’ll set off the bombs --  _ Nell swallows one last gasp of air before the walls fall as well. 


	12. Chapter 12

He escapes his trial with hardly any punishment. No torn limbs, no serious injuries. Syl Kavala's words fade from his mind. She meant to make him doubt the Order, but he's always doubted the Council. She meant to make him doubt himself, but he's never had much faith placed there. Once, he knew that he was something to be owned, and it never really left, that malleability. The knowledge that there is no self to exist. You only have what your masters give you.

The only thing he cannot doubt is the violence. The fighting. The need for survival, that bubbles in his stomach like magma. The war has to end, and the only thing that seems to bring them closer to the promise of rest, of true, dreamless sleep, is the killing. 

Anakin is good at it. It's why he's scheduled to ship out on the next deployment, in a matter of days. The Order needs his blade, the one they've honed. 

He already gave his report to the Council. All neatly tied up. 

Ahsoka finds him in his domicile. She's not going with him on this mission. He wants her to stay in the Temple, find some serenity, the kind that he's long since given up feeling. 

"I'm really glad you're okay, Master." Ahsoka buries her head in his chest. He clutches at her, the small frame of her body. If she wasn't here - it doesn't matter. She is here, and for a starbright moment, the war does not consume every inch of space in his head. 

"You should see Master Obi-Wan before you go," his padawan tells him. "He doesn't look so good."

"I wouldn't know," Anakin says, stiff. 

He hasn't seen Obi-Wan since reporting to the Council. Since he told them how he'd ended the threat, pulled down the very walls around him to do it, the way he’d pulled down the pillars of Ul-Saan. 

The Senator and her administrative staff had suffered only minor injuries. His shield had held reasonably well, considering it was an afterthought. He'd crushed the support beams holding up the ceiling in a second of cold, calm, burning fury, his heart like a dead star in his chest, not thinking of anyone else, that dragon from his hallucinatory dream rising from the sands.

Anakin hadn't explained that to the Council, but it felt like his master had known, somehow, with his clear, piercing gaze that always seemed intent on burrowing under his ribs. 

Instead, Anakin told them of the Kavala’s lost sister. He had felt Obi-Wan’s stare heavy on the side of his face. “They would have killed everyone in the Senate Dome for her,” Anakin explained. When he turned, Obi-Wan had looked away. 

“Are you sure you’re okay, Snips?”

Ahsoka’s lower tip trembles. But then she bites it, and looks away. “They hated the Jedi,” his padawan says slowly. “Nan and Syl Kavala. They hated the Jedi and the Senate and the Republic so much they were gonna kill everyone for it.”

He can’t do anything but nod. Ahsoka tugs on one of her lekku. “It’s like on Cabaron,” she says, and Anakin wants to bash his head into the wall. He is so damned tired of thinking about Cabaron. 

“They hated us,” Ahsoka continues, a hushed confession. “I didn’t feel anything good about that mission.”

“Me neither.”

“Would you leave the Order, like Hafi did?”

The question jars him. “No,” he says, automatically. He could expand on that, tell his padawan about the way he dreams of the freedom, and the same way the thought repulses him, utterly, when Obi-Wan lays a hand on his shoulder.

Not until the war’s over, Anakin could say. Not until it takes everything that is good and bright in the world. _ I have to see it to the end. Otherwise, there was no point. _

“Would you?” he finally thinks to ask, but Ahsoka’s already leaving, ducking through the doorway.

Anakin goes to find his own master. He follows the threads of the Force, weaving a path for him to tread, their bond like a living thing, all blood and hunger, the desperation of a sentient life form, struggling to cling on no matter what.

Obi-Wan sits, legs folded, at the center of an empty meditation room. Grass waves around his knees. His face is tilted up towards the artificial sun like he can soak up any ounce of its nonexistent warmth. 

Anakin doesn't say a word, but Obi-Wan's eyes open. No greeting passes between them. He slumps to the earth across from his old master. 

"I'm sorry." It tumbles out, into freefall.

"You brought down a city, trying to protect me," Obi-Wan says evenly. 

Anakin lowers his gaze to the carpet of wild grass. There are arguments to be made - soldiers in danger, a blockade at risk, the grand strategy of a chessboard larger than any individual pawn. There's a war going on, he could have said, but Obi-Wan knows that. 

And Anakin knows why he ordered the bombardment when he did. His Master was going to die. He would have pulled down every beautiful pillar of Ul-Saan with his bare hands if it would have helped. 

_ You are worth more than a city_, he wants to say. Anakin is not made to love on any scale smaller than the universe. 

"I did," he says finally. 

"Attachment," Obi-Wan responds. It could have been a reprimand, if his voice hadn't gone soft and sad, if his hand hadn't come up to cradle Anakin's cheek. 

Obi-Wan presses their brows together. He doesn't speak anymore. His shields, however, are low. The lowest they've been in weeks, and Anakin falls into him. Feels the shape of a thought Obi-Wan does not, cannot voice. A thought that would destroy everything Obi-Wan believes himself to be, were it spoken.

_ If you ever fell, it would not be just a city that I would bring down. _

There is a darkness in it, deadly and massive, an incongruous black hole. Anakin turns his gaze away from the familiarity, from any cosmological truth. He prevents that thought from being heard, he preserves the silence. Anakin leans in, and kisses him.


End file.
